The first thing people see
Think about how a customer arrives through a recommendation. Someone asks in a group chat "does anyone know a good beauty salon in Palermo?", someone else replies with your link, and before opening your website, the person who asked sees the little card WhatsApp builds under the message.
That card is the first thing they see of your business. If it shows a clear image, a title that says what you do and a line that makes them curious, they tap. If it shows a bare link or a grey "Home", that's one less reason to do it. And if three other options were shared in the same group, it's easy for them to tap another one.
Where it comes from: Open Graph
WhatsApp doesn't build the preview by looking at your website: it builds it by reading some tags hidden in the page's code. They're called Open Graph, Facebook created them, and today WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Telegram and many other apps read them.
The ones people see are three:
- og:image, the image.
- og:title, the title.
- og:description, the line underneath.
If they're missing, each app improvises. It takes the browser tab title (which on many websites says "Home" or just the name), grabs some image from the page (an icon, a cropped banner) or shows nothing. That's why two equally good websites can look very different in a chat.
How to check your link preview on WhatsApp
- Send the link to yourself on WhatsApp, or to someone you trust, and look at the card. Try your homepage and an inner page: they can look different.
- Run it through Meta's Sharing Debugger, at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. It needs a Facebook account. It shows which image, title and description it reads from your page, and warns you if a tag is missing.
The three parts, done right
1. The image
- Horizontal and high resolution. Meta asks for images at least 1080 pixels wide; the most common size is 1200 × 630.
- Lightweight. WhatsApp doesn't publish a limit, but in practice it usually shows the thumbnail for images up to about 300 KB. A heavy photo can make nothing show up at all.
- The important part in the center. Depending on the app and the size, the image can appear large above the link or cropped into a small square on the side. If your brand or your text sits near an edge, it gets lost.
- Make it say something. Your logo alone on a plain background doesn't tell anyone what you do. A photo of finished work, or your name next to what you do, does.
2. The title
- What you do and where, in a few words. "Beauty salon in Palermo · Sala Brisa" says more than "Home" or the name alone. (Sala Brisa is a made-up example.) A real one: the website of Dr. Manuel Cabrera Castedo, which we built, shares the title "Dr. Manuel Cabrera Castedo · Neurocirujano de columna en Buenos Aires" (spine neurosurgeon in Buenos Aires): who he is, what he does and where.
- Short. In the chat it gets cut after one or two lines: put the important part first.
3. The line of text
- One or two sentences that say what people get and something concrete: "Same-day online booking, Monday to Saturday."
- If you don't set it, many apps take the first text they find on the page, which can be a menu or a cookie notice.
I changed it and it still looks the same
Apps keep the preview for a while so they don't read your page every time someone shares it. Meta, for example, caches images by their address and doesn't update them until the address changes.
- On Facebook: run the link through the Sharing Debugger. Besides showing you what it reads, it reads the page again.
- On WhatsApp: add something to the end of the link, like ?v=2. To the app it's a new address, so it builds the preview from scratch.
How to change it
- If your website is built on a platform, look in the settings for the SEO or social media section: most have a place to upload the image, title and description shown when it's shared.
- If it's custom built, it's a few lines in the code of each page. Whoever manages your website can change it in minutes; if you don't have anyone, it's part of what we do when we build or improve a website.
- Each page can have its own. A product, a service or an article can show its own image and title instead of repeating the homepage's. This article has its own (the photo at the top, under 200 KB): send it to yourself and see how it looks.
