WhatsApp link preview not working or not showing

Why the WhatsApp preview is missing or small

• The image is too heavy. WhatsApp asks for an image under 600 KB. Most other platforms allow far more, so this is the usual cause.

• The head is too far down. The <head> with your tags must appear in the first 300 KB of the HTML.

• A tag is empty or outside the head. og:title, og:description and og:url must be in the head and not empty.

• The image is too narrow or too wide. It should be 300 px or wider with a width-to-height ratio of 4:1 or less.

• The image URL is relative. og:image has to be an absolute URL.

How to fix it

1. Open the page in the meta tag checker and confirm the four og: tags.

2. Compress the image below 600 KB. A 1200 x 630 JPG usually fits. Check it with the OG image size checker.

3. Move scripts and large inline code below the tags so the head stays in the first 300 KB.

4. Set og:url to the clean canonical URL, without tracking or session parameters.

5. Paste the link in a new message and wait. If no preview appears after 10 seconds, one of the rules above still fails.

Tags WhatsApp reads

• og:title shown bold, up to 2 lines, without branding

• og:description shown smaller, 1 or 2 lines; 80 characters is enough

• og:url the canonical URL

• og:image the thumbnail

Image size rules

• Under 600 KB

• At least 300 px wide

• Width-to-height ratio of 4:1 or less

• Absolute URL

How to force a refresh

WhatsApp has no refresh tool. Send the URL with a query string, such as ?v=2, so it fetches the page as a new link. Messages already sent keep their preview. The refresh tool lists this step next to the other platforms.

Not verified: WhatsApp doesn’t publish how long it caches previews. Some guides say Facebook’s Sharing Debugger also refreshes WhatsApp; WhatsApp’s own docs don’t say this, and its crawler uses its own WhatsApp user agent.

Sources

• WhatsApp Link Previews (Meta developer docs)