og:image¶
Wygard watches the content of the <meta property="og:image"> tag and alerts you when the preview image shown for your shared links changes or disappears.
| Scope | Tier | Default | Alert |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per URL | Basic | Off — enable via the OG group | 🟠 Heads-up |
Why it matters¶
og:image is the picture that renders when your URL is shared on social platforms and chat apps — the single biggest driver of whether a shared link gets clicked. When a template change, an asset migration, or a CDN move breaks the image URL, the preview collapses to a blank box or a broken thumbnail, and the drop in social click-through is easy to miss because your pages still look perfect.
The default severity is Heads-up. The test is off by default and is part of the OG selection group.
What Wygard checks¶
On every run, the crawler:
- Fetches the monitored URL.
- Extracts the
contentattribute of<meta property="og:image">from the<head>. - Compares the found value against the stored desired value.
Common alerts¶
- og:image changed — the tag now points at a different image URL than the baseline.
- og:image not found — the tag was removed, so shared links render with no preview image.
- Multiple og:image tags — more than one was detected; platforms pick one unpredictably.
Responding to an alert¶
- Open the alert and review the diff — Wygard shows the previous image URL and the new one.
- Decide whether the change was intended (a new share image) or accidental (an asset that moved, a CDN path that changed, a plugin that stopped emitting the tag).
- If intended, click Set found value as desired to adopt the new image as the baseline.
- If accidental, restore the tag or the asset and let the next crawl turn the test green.
Wygard watches the tag, not the pixels
This test compares the og:image URL against the baseline. It confirms the tag still declares an image — pair it with the per-URL Status code test on the image URL itself if you also want to know the file behind it still returns 200.
Enable the whole OG group
Enable the OG selection group to watch og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url together.