When someone shares your WordPress post on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Slack, Discord, or any other platform that generates a link preview, the preview is built from Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags in your HTML head. Rank Forge outputs all of these automatically — title, description, image, type, URL — with per-post overrides and a global fallback image.
Open Graph (OG) is a meta tag protocol created by Facebook in 2010 and now used by basically every social platform. The OG tags on a page tell link-preview crawlers:
og:title — the headline for the previewog:description — the subtitle textog:image — the image to show in the preview cardog:url — the canonical URLog:type — the content type (article, website, product, etc.)og:site_name — the site the content lives onTwitter Cards are a parallel protocol from Twitter with similar but distinct tags:
twitter:card — card type (summary, summary_large_image, player, app)twitter:titletwitter:descriptiontwitter:imagetwitter:site — your Twitter/X handletwitter:creator — the author’s Twitter/X handleRank Forge outputs both sets of tags on every page automatically.
For every published post, Rank Forge outputs:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your Post Title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Your post excerpt or meta description..." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/featured.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yoursite.com/your-post/" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Your Site Name" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Your Post Title" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Your post excerpt or meta description..." />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/featured.jpg" />Each tag is automatically populated from the post’s metadata. You can override any of them in the Rank Forge meta box.
The Rank Forge meta box has a dedicated Social Preview section with fields for:
Use these when the post title or featured image doesn’t make a great social card — for example, a technical article with a boring thumbnail where you’d rather upload a custom promotional image.
The Rank Forge meta box shows a live preview of how the post will appear when shared on:
As you edit OG fields, the preview updates live. You see exactly what your share card will look like before publishing.
If a post doesn’t have a custom OG image and also doesn’t have a featured image, Rank Forge falls back to a Global Default OG Image set in plugin settings. The cascade is:
Set a good global default OG image (your site logo on a branded background, typically) and every post has a social preview even without specific work.
Different platforms prefer different image sizes:
Rank Forge recommends 1200 × 630 as the default target, which works well across all major platforms. When you upload a custom OG image, the plugin warns you if the dimensions are likely to get cropped or distorted on specific platforms.
For WooCommerce product pages, Rank Forge automatically sets og:type to product and populates product-specific OG fields (product:price:amount, product:price:currency, product:availability) from WooCommerce data. Facebook’s product-specific preview card then shows the price and stock status directly.
When a link preview looks wrong on Facebook, the cause is almost always stale cached data. Facebook’s Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) lets you re-scrape the URL after updating OG tags. Twitter’s Card Validator does the same.
Rank Forge’s admin links to both tools directly from the meta box for quick debugging.
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Open Graph and Twitter Card output is included in every version of Rank Forge, including the free one.
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