Why Your Links Look Broken on Slack (And the 5-Minute Fix)
You wrote a solid article. You hit publish. You share the link on Slack. It shows up as a plain URL with no image, no title preview, just a bare link that nobody clicks. That's an Open Graph problem. And it kills more traffic than bad headlines. What Open Graph Actually Does When you paste a URL into Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, or iMessage, those platforms send a bot to scrape your page. The bot looks for specific <meta> tags in your <head> to build the preview card. If those tags are missing or wrong, you get a blank card. Sometimes you get nothing at all. The four tags that matter most: <meta property= "og:title" content= "Your Title Here" /> <meta property= "og:description" content= "A short description." /> <meta property= "og:image" content= "https://yoursite.com/og-image.png" /> <meta name= "twitter:card" content= "summary_large_image" /> The og:image is the one most developers skip. It requires an actual image file — 1200×630px, hosted somewhere public, referenced by U
Continue reading on Dev.to Webdev
Opens in a new tab
