Customize the social preview card

When someone pastes your smart link into Slack, Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, WhatsApp, etc., those platforms send a preview crawler to fetch the URL and build a "card" (image + title + description). Without configuration, you get a generic card. With a few fields filled in, you get a branded card that drives clicks.

How it works

OhLinks detects link-preview crawlers by their User-Agent (Slackbot, Twitterbot, facebookexternalhit, LinkedInBot, etc.) and serves them a small HTML page with OpenGraph and Twitter Card meta tags. Real users still get the redirect — they never see this page.

Generic search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot) follow the redirect like real users, so it's the destination URL that gets indexed, not OhLinks.

Add preview metadata

Open your link's Edit page (Dashboard → click a link).
Scroll to the "Social preview card" section.
Fill in:
- Preview title — what appears as the card headline. Keep it under 60 characters for best display.
- Preview description — a short pitch. ~150 characters works well across all platforms.
- Preview image URL — must be a publicly accessible URL (not behind auth). Recommended: 1200×630 px, under 5 MB, JPG or PNG. Hosted anywhere (your CDN, Cloudinary, S3 with public ACL).
Click Save changes.

That's it. Within seconds, every platform that re-crawls your link will pick up the new metadata.

What it looks like

With all three fields filled, your card displays as a "large image card" on Twitter, Slack, etc. Without an image, it falls back to a smaller text-only card.

Force a re-crawl

Some platforms cache previews for hours. To force an immediate refresh:

Twitter/X — paste the link into the Card Validator (logged-in).
Facebook / LinkedIn — use the Sharing Debugger and click "Scrape Again".
Slack — type /remind to yourself with the URL — the next paste re-crawls.
Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord — append a unique query string (?v=2) to bust their cache. The smart link still resolves correctly because we ignore non-utm_* query params.

What if I leave the fields empty?

You still get a valid (but generic) card with a default title ("Open in app") and description. No image. We recommend always setting at least the title and description for branded links.

Privacy

We store only the strings you enter and the image URL — we never re-host or proxy the image. If the image URL becomes inaccessible, the card falls back to text-only.