Which Open Graph tags still matter — and their limits

Most “Open Graph tags” cheatsheets are a 2014 gist with twenty properties nobody reads. Facebook will clip your headline mid-word. LinkedIn will ignore half of what you pasted. X will ignore og:image unless twitter:card is set. Here are the OG tags that still matter, and the limits that actually bite.

This is not a meta-tag generator. The picture behind og:image is a separate file. OGForge makes that file; the OG image checker reads the tags you already shipped.

The tags a card actually uses

Set these. Everything else is optional.

• og:title — the headline on the card. Aim for ~60 characters. Our checker warns past 60 and fails past 70. Distinctive words first; do not burn 20 characters on a brand prefix if og:site_name is set.
• og:description — one sentence of consequence, not a keyword list. Aim for ~155 characters (warn), 200 (fail). Discord and LinkedIn show more than Facebook; nobody shows a paragraph.
• og:image — an absolute HTTPS URL to a 1200×630 file. Relative paths (/og.png) and http:// files are two of the highest-signal failures. See why your OG image is not showing.
• og:url — the canonical page, also HTTPS. Shares should point at one URL.
• og:type — usually website or article. Wrong type rarely hides the image; missing type is fine on most networks.

Search engines still read <title> and meta name="description". Social crawlers prefer the og:* properties. Set both; do not assume one fills the other.

Image tags people skip

<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og.png">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">
<meta property="og:image:alt" content="Short description of the card">

Width and height stop the first unfurl from guessing a tiny layout. Alt is accessibility plus a fallback caption. og:image:type (image/png, image/jpeg) is optional.

Do not stack ten og:image tags “for different networks.” Most scrapers take the first usable one. One 1200×630 file is the boring, correct default — OG image size.

File limits that show up as “no image”:

• Under 200×200 — dropped or thumbnailed
• Over 8 MB — Facebook rejects it
• Over ~1 MB — WhatsApp and iMessage often vanish. Prefer JPEG for photos.

Twitter is not Open Graph

X does not treat OG as gospel. Without twitter:card = summary_large_image, you often get a small summary — or nothing that looks like your OG image.

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Your title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Your description">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://example.com/og.png">

twitter:title / twitter:description should match the OG pair unless you have a reason. twitter:image can fall back to og:image, but setting both avoids a surprise small card. Full debug: why your OG image doesn't show on Twitter/X.

Nice-to-haves (not magic)

• og:site_name — LinkedIn and Slack show it. Do not also stuff the brand into og:title.
• og:locale — en_US style. Useful on multilingual sites; ignored by most unfurls.
• og:audio / og:video — not an image card. Skip unless you are actually embedding media.
• Facebook fb:app_id — only if you have a Facebook app. It does not make the preview appear.

There is no official character cap in the Open Graph protocol. The numbers above match how cards clip in 2026 and how our checker scores a page — not a law.

After you trim

Re-scrape Facebook and LinkedIn. They cache the old headline. Then glance at the checker previews — they use the tags we fetched, so they are a decent “will this wrap onto three lines?” test.

If the copy is the problem, paste the page into the OG image checker and open the ? on a row for the exact count. If the picture has to carry the title, that is what the OG image generator is for (PNG is free; Pro adds JPEG/WebP and the API).