Paste your website into WhatsApp or LinkedIn. Do you get a rich card with an image and title — or a bare, gray link? If it's the bare link, you're missing Open Graph tags, and every share of your site is losing you free clicks.
Three lines of HTML in your page's head that tell social platforms what to show: og:title (the headline), og:description (the summary), and og:image (the picture). Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord and iMessage all read them.
Links with preview cards get dramatically more clicks than bare URLs — people don't click what looks broken or suspicious. Every customer who shares your site is doing free marketing for you; missing OG tags throws that away.
On WordPress, an SEO plugin (AIOSEO, Yoast, Rank Math) can set these — but check the social image is actually configured; the plugins often leave og:image empty. On a custom site, add the three meta tags to your head with an image of 1200×630 pixels.
After adding tags, platforms cache old previews. Use LinkedIn's Post Inspector or Facebook's Sharing Debugger to force a refresh — or just check with a site scan that reads exactly what social platforms will see.