See how your link will look before you share it

A shared link is a piece of design you did not know you were doing. Somebody posts your page, and what appears is a title, a line of description and an image assembled from tags most people set once and never look at. When those tags are missing, the platform improvises, and its improvisation is usually the first sentence of your navigation.

The commonest failure is not a missing tag, it is a description that got truncated somewhere unfortunate. Search results cut at around 155 characters, social cards cut shorter and differently, and a description written to fill the space reads as a sentence that stops. Writing the important half first is the whole technique.

The second commonest is an image that is technically present and practically useless. Cards are cropped to their own ratio, so an image with text near the edges loses it, and a tall image loses most of itself. A share card is a different asset from a page hero, which is why sites that care generate the two separately rather than hoping one will do both jobs.

Then there is the class of error nobody catches, which is a tag that is present and wrong. A canonical pointing at the wrong page, an og:url from the template it was copied out of, a title that is right in the tab and wrong in the card. None of these break anything. They just quietly send people, and crawlers, somewhere you did not intend.

This applet takes HTML you paste rather than fetching a URL, which is a deliberate limitation and occasionally an advantage: it works on a page that is not published yet, behind a login, or on a staging environment nobody outside can reach. That is usually when you actually want to check it, rather than after the first person has shared it.

If the same tags keep coming out wrong, the fix is not this applet. Metadata that is hand written per page drifts as soon as a page is copied to make another, and the durable answer is generating it from the content, so a page cannot be published with somebody else's description attached.