Fixing your site's metadata: a practical checklist
You've done it. You're finally done building the website or application you've been working on for quite a while. Proud and elated, you go to share this on your socials or to your buddies — uh oh, what's this now? The preview in WhatsApp shows no headline, your avatar is cropped and dimensions seem wrong. I've been there too. The site looked fine in the browser. The problem was everything outside the browser: link previews, search snippets, and tab icons all use a separate metadata layer most of us skip until something breaks. So, how do you fix this? Use this as a pre-launch checklist — or run it on a site that's already live but sharing badly. What I ran into on my own portfolio When I ran this audit on shwethaadiraj.com , the site rendered fine — but sharing it told a different story. I had pointed both the favicon and Open Graph image at my profile avatar. At tab size the illustration was unreadable; in link previews it got cropped awkwardly. An OG validator then flagged two things I hadn't considered: the image was 512×512 (most platforms expect 1200×630 ), and there was no headline or CTA on the image itself — so Slack and LinkedIn showed a plain square with none of the context from my meta title. I replaced the favicon with a simplified monogram, regenerated the OG image at the correct aspect ratio with my name, tagline, and site URL on it, and re-ran the debuggers. Even then, previews didn't update until I hit Scrape Again — platforms cache OG data aggressively, so fixes on your end won't show up until you bust that cache. None of this required rethinking the app. It was a metadata pass — the kind of work that's easy to defer and annoying to discover at the share button. Before we get into the specifics, here's a primer on what metadata can actually impact: What is metadata for? Metadata, simply put, is data about data. Search engines, crawlers and social sites all parse different metadata from your app. Search & Discovery: The title and description in your