Twitter card
A Twitter card, now the card on X, is the preview drawn when someone posts a link: an image, a title and a description instead of a bare URL. It is set with twitter: meta tags, and falls back to your Open Graph tags when those tags are absent.
By Théophile Louvart, founder of Porteur · Updated 15 September 2026 · Markdown
The fallback to Open Graph
X reads the twitter: tags first and falls back to the Open Graph tags for anything missing. A page with og:title, og:description and og:image already previews correctly, with one exception: without twitter:card the platform may draw the small card rather than the wide one.
- Set twitter:card to summary_large_image, and let the rest fall back to Open Graph.
- Add twitter:image only when you want a different image there than on the other platforms.
- twitter:site names the account, which is shown on the card in some contexts.
How to check it now
Read the tags
View source on the page and confirm twitter:card is present and the image URL is absolute.
Post the link in a draft
The card validator was retired. Composing a post without sending it shows the real card, which is the test that counts.
Check one page per template
The home page, the pricing page and a library page usually use different templates; the missing image is always on the one nobody posts.
Expect caching
Cards are cached, so a link already shared may keep the old image for a while after you change it.
Questions
Usually only one: twitter:card set to summary_large_image. The title, description and image fall back to your Open Graph tags.
The first draws a small square image beside the text, the second a wide image above it. The wide card is the one people click.
Compose a post with the link and look at the preview without sending it. That is the real rendering, including the cache.
The platform caches cards. After changing the image, the new card appears on new shares; links already posted can keep the old one.
No. They affect how a link looks when shared, which affects clicks and mentions, not ranking directly.
Check my site, free
The free check reads the tags your pages carry for search and for shares, and names what is missing, in about thirty seconds.
- Free check, no card
- Read-only, your own accounts
- Readable by your agent