Is 1200 x 630 required?
No. It is the practical default. Meta recommends at least 1200 x 630 for high-resolution displays, and LinkedIn lists 1200 x 627 with a 1.91:1 ratio. The important part is a crawlable image with a safe composition.
OG image diagnostics
OG Image Size Checker
The usual recommendation is 1200 x 630 pixels. I still check the actual image because the tag can point at an old file, a tiny thumbnail, a giant PNG, a blocked image, or a URL that only works in a browser.
What the checker reports
- The detected og:image URL.
- The fetched image width and height.
- The image file size when the server exposes it.
- Whether the image loads in the browser preview.
- Whether the page also provides twitter:image.
- Whether the generated card looks reasonable across platform previews.
Recommended shape
1200 x 630 is the practical default for Open Graph images because it gives platforms enough pixels and keeps the card near a 1.91:1 ratio.
Absolute URLs
Use a full https image URL. Some crawlers handle relative URLs poorly, and absolute URLs remove one avoidable failure.
Twitter fallback
Use twitter:card and twitter:image when you care about X/Twitter. It can use Open Graph data, but explicit tags make the result easier to reason about.
Size checks I do
- Confirm a new blog image is at least 1200 x 630 before publishing.
- Check whether a CMS generated a tiny thumbnail instead of the full social image.
- Find old PNGs that are too heavy for a link preview crawler.
- Compare the detected og:image with the image the page owner expected.
Common questions
Why does X/Twitter use a different crop?
A summary_large_image card is closer to a 2:1 shape. A 1200 x 630 Open Graph image is close enough for most pages, but keep important content away from the top, bottom, and edges.
Should the file be under 1 MB?
That is my target, not a universal rule. Smaller images fetch faster and fail less often. Some platforms publish larger limits, but a huge social image buys you very little.
The size I start with
For normal articles, docs, landing pages, and products, I start with 1200 x 630. It is close to the standard 1.91:1 Open Graph shape and works well across Facebook, LinkedIn, X large cards, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage.
Exact display size still changes by platform and device. The goal is not pixel-perfect rendering everywhere. The goal is a crawlable image with enough safe area that the title, product, or screenshot survives common crops.
The common failures
The most common failure is not the pixel size. It is the wrong URL. Relative image URLs, staging URLs, expired signed URLs, blocked hotlinking, and redirects to HTML pages all create bad previews.
Large files are another practical problem. A 1200 x 630 JPEG or PNG should not need to be huge. If the preview image is several megabytes, some crawlers will time out or skip it.
Format matters too. JPEG and PNG are the boring choices that work everywhere. WebP support is better than it used to be, but I still avoid it for primary OG images when the goal is broad compatibility.
What to do after a failed size check
If the dimensions are wrong, regenerate the image at 1200 x 630 and keep important content away from the edges. If the image is blocked, fix the response before changing the design.
If the image is correct but a platform still shows the old one, you are probably looking at platform cache. Use the platform debugger when one exists, or change the image URL so the crawler has to fetch a new resource.
Use the checker first
The existing checker already fetches the URL, reads the tags, checks the image, reports dimensions and file size, and shows the platform previews. This page is the entry point; the checker is where the work happens.
Open the checker