Let’s look at a common situation.

Priya is a high-end wedding planner. She is talking to a wealthy client on WhatsApp who wants to see her portfolio. Priya sends the link to her website: priyaevents.com.

When the link appears in the chat, it has no image, no logo, and a generic title that says “Home - My Website”. It looks plain, unprofessional, and almost like spam. The client is unimpressed and assumes Priya is a small-time operator.

What Priya wanted was a link preview showing one of her own floral arrangements, her brand logo, and a description that reads: “Luxury Wedding Planning & Decors in Varanasi.”

Here is why your links look plain when shared, and how to fix them in minutes.

What Open Graph tags are

When you paste a link into WhatsApp, Facebook, or LinkedIn, these apps don’t guess what your page is about. Instead, they scan your website’s code for special tags called Open Graph tags (or OG tags).

These tags tell the app exactly:

  • OG Image: Which photo to show as the thumbnail — and like every other image on the site, it is worth compressing before it goes up.
  • OG Title: The bold headline of the link preview.
  • OG Description: The short text summary below the title.

If your website is missing these tags, WhatsApp and Facebook will either show a blank grey box or grab a random, unrelated image from your website (like a close-up of a button or an advertisement).

You can test how your website looks when shared and generate the correct tags:

  1. Go to our free Solvey OG Preview Generator.
  2. Enter your website URL and click “Generate Preview”.
  3. The tool will show you a live simulation of how your link looks on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  4. Fill in the form on the left to set your custom Title, Description, and image.
  5. Click “Copy Tags” and paste the code into your website’s <head> section.

Is this a standard?

Yes, the Open Graph protocol was created by Facebook and is the industry-standard way to manage link previews across all messaging and social media platforms.

You can read the official guidelines at the Open Graph Protocol Specs Page.

Getting it right on every page, not just the home page

A link that arrives in a WhatsApp chat as a grey box is doing the opposite of what you sent it for. On the sites we build, every page carries its own preview title, description and image, so whichever page a customer forwards looks like it belongs to you.

Preview tags are part of every build we ship — see web development — and the images in them come from graphic design. Email hello@solvey.in.