You paste your web address into a chat and wait a second to see what comes up. Sometimes it is a decent photo with the business name, and sometimes an empty box with the address in grey. That difference is called the link preview, and it is not WhatsApp's doing: you decide it from your own website, though nobody has probably ever told you so.
What your customer sees when you send the link
Think how many times a month somebody shares your address: you on WhatsApp, a customer recommending you in a neighbourhood group, somebody pasting it into an email. Every one of those times, the first thing seen is not your website: it is that box.
And an empty box works like a covered shop window: it does not say you are bad, it says nobody is minding the place.
What the link preview is and where it gets its data
When you paste a link, the app visits the page, reads some tags hidden in the code and builds the card from them. Those tags follow a standard called Open Graph, born at Facebook and used by nearly everyone today: it is documented on the Open Graph protocol page.
The four lines that decide everything
- og:title. The card headline. Short, with the business name.
- og:description. One sentence explaining what that page is about.
- og:image. The photo. Most looked at, most often missing.
- og:url. The canonical address of the page, so it does not get duplicated.
Four lines of code. Adding them takes minutes; the problem is that hardly any website has them right.
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Why it sometimes comes up blank
The causes repeat, and they are nearly always one of four: there is no image tag and the app cannot find one it can use; the image is set with a relative address that cannot be loaded from outside; it is so heavy the app gives up waiting; or the page does not let in the robot that is meant to read it.
That fourth one is the sneakiest, because the site works perfectly in a browser and the preview still refuses to appear.
The image: size, weight and what gets cropped
This is 80 % of the result. A badly sized photo gets cropped in the wrong place and what is left is half a face or half a logo.
What works in practice
- 1200 by 630 pixels. The size nearly every app respects.
- Under 300 KB. If it runs to megabytes, some places will not load it.
- The important part centred. Edges get cropped differently in each app.
- No small text. On a phone that card is about four fingers wide.
Which photos to use and which not, with the detail on formats and sizes, is in photos for your website. And if your site is slow, the same images are usually to blame: why your website is slow on mobile.
The card title is not the one Google shows
Two different things, and worth keeping apart. The title and description that appear in search results have their own rules and their own length; the chat card is shorter and reads more like a message than an advert.
The first one is covered in title tag and meta description. The second is what you are reading.
One image per page, not one for the whole site
The most common mistake after having none at all: using the same home-page photo across forty pages. If somebody shares a specific service page, the card should show that service, not the logo.
That goes hand in hand with having the pages properly separated, which is what website structure is about.
The favicon, the detail nobody checks
It is the little icon on the browser tab, and it also shows next to your result on mobile and in some chats. When it is missing, a generic document icon appears, and it shows. Google explains what is needed for it to be picked up in its documentation on the favicon in search results.
Ten minutes of work, and more noticeable than it sounds.
Why WhatsApp still shows last month's image
Because it keeps a copy. The first time somebody shares your link, the app reads the page and holds on to what it found; after that, even if you change the photo, it keeps showing the old one for a while.
How to force a refresh
For anything belonging to Meta there is the sharing debugger described in its webmaster sharing guide: you give it the address, it re-reads the page, and from then on the new one shows. WhatsApp has no equivalent button, so what works is sharing the link with an extra parameter on the end the first time after a change.
If the old one is still showing days later, it nearly always means the tag was never actually changed where it mattered.
What not to put in that image
- A poster full of text. At that size none of it is readable.
- The logo alone on a white background. The least eye-catching option there is.
- A stock photo everybody has seen a thousand times.
- A screenshot of your own website. It looks blurry and says nothing.
What does work
A photo of you, your team, your premises or a finished job. The closer it is to what the customer will actually find on arriving, the better. And a shot showing the front of the building counts double, because whoever opens the link is often deciding whether to come over.
And if your site is in several languages
Each version needs its own tags, with the title and description in its own language. It sounds obvious and it fails constantly: the Catalan page showing the Spanish card is one of the things we see most when reviewing a bilingual site. How to set that up without duplicating the work is in a website in Catalan and Spanish.
The link you share is not always the one you think
If you copy the address from the browser bar after arriving through an ad, you sometimes drag a chunk of odd text along at the end. It works, but it looks untidy and in some cases it makes the card read differently.
It is worth keeping the clean address of the three or four pages you share most.
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Changing your website breaks this
It is one of the things most often forgotten in a migration: the new site goes live without the tags and suddenly every link people had saved starts showing an empty box. It belongs on the same checklist as everything else: migrating your website without losing rankings.
On social media the same thing happens, only worse
In a chat the card is small; in a post it takes up half the screen. If you paste your web address into a social network and the grey box comes up, that is what your business looks like to everybody scrolling past.
How this fits with everything else you publish is in social media for local businesses, and if your main channel is WhatsApp, in WhatsApp Business for your business.
The three-chat test
No tools needed to find out where you stand.
The three places to check it
- A chat with yourself on WhatsApp, pasting the home page and two service pages.
- An email to your own address, because some mail clients build the card too.
- A draft post on whichever network you use, without publishing it.
If all three show the right image and the right title, you are fine. If any of them shows the grey box, you know where to start.
What to do if somebody else built your site
It is a small, very specific job, so you can ask for it exactly as it is: «I want Open Graph tags on every page, with a 1200 by 630 image per section». Whoever runs your site will understand first time, and if they do not, you have learned something else.
What we check
On the sites we run, this is part of maintenance: that every page has its four tags, that the image exists and is light, that the favicon is in place, and that after any change it gets checked in a chat before the job is called done. What else that maintenance covers is in website maintenance: what it covers.
What a proper link preview costs
If we run your website, nothing extra: it is inside the monthly fee. In our prices, Tu Landing is 100 € a month and Tu Web 200 €, plus VAT and with no lock-in, with domain, hosting, email and maintenance included; the presence plans are 400, 750 and 1,500 € a month.
And if somebody else runs it, this should not be a project either: it is half an afternoon of well-spent work.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, with businesses across Girona and Barcelona
If you want to settle the question, run the chat-with-yourself test and send us the screenshot through the contact form or by WhatsApp. We will tell you shortly whether it is a four-line fix or something deeper.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.