Previews for pages that aren't articles

Most advice about link previews assumes you’re sharing a blog post. Homepages, documentation, product pages, pricing pages and authenticated app screens each behave differently, and for some of them the correct answer is one good site-level card rather than per-page work.

Deciding which category a page falls into saves building infrastructure you don’t need.

Homepages

The most-shared URL on most sites, and frequently the worst card, because the homepage has no single subject to summarise.

What works: treat the card as positioning rather than description. og:title is the site name plus what it does — not just the name. og:description is the sentence you’d use to explain the site to someone who’s never heard of it. The image is a designed card with the name and that same one-line description, not a screenshot.

What doesn’t: a hero-section screenshot. Hero sections are designed to be read at full width with the rest of the page around them; at card size they’re an illegible smear.

Worth checking that your homepage’s tags don’t leak onto every other page — the most common template bug in this area.

Documentation

Many pages, similar structure, low individual sharing volume but high total. Shared into chat constantly, where the card is the reader’s first cue about what they’re being sent.

Reasonable approach: per-page title and description generated from the page’s own heading and first paragraph, plus one shared image for the whole documentation set — or an automatically generated image with the page title on it. Per-page bespoke images aren’t worth it at this volume.

The title format matters more than usual here, because docs pages are shared alongside other docs pages. Page title — Docs — Product truncates badly; Page title with og:site_name set separately reads better.

Product and pricing pages

Commercially the most valuable to get right, and the place where a designed image earns its keep, because these links are shared in contexts where the recipient is deciding whether to click.

Per-page work is justified: a specific title, a description of what this page will tell them, and an image that says something concrete. If a product page shows a product, an actual clear product image on a plain background is one of the few cases where photography beats a text card.

Avoid marketing copy that says nothing. “The future of workflow” as a card description is worse than naming the thing the page is about.

Listing and category pages

Blog indexes, tag pages, search results, catalogue categories. Genuinely low-value to share, and worth minimal effort: a title naming the category, a description saying what’s in it, and the site’s default image.

Don’t spend real time here. If a category page gets shared often, that’s a signal to build a proper page for the topic rather than to design a better card for the listing.

Authenticated app screens

Special case, and one people get wrong in a risky way.

A URL like /projects/4821/ shared into a chat gets fetched by the platform’s crawler, which is not logged in. Two consequences:

Whatever the crawler can see becomes the card. If your app renders any content before the auth check — a project name, a customer name, a document title — that content ends up in a preview visible to everyone in the channel. Worth actively testing, because it’s a real leak.

The crawler usually sees your login page, so the card is your login page’s tags on every internal link shared.

Sane handling: serve a deliberate, generic site-level card for all authenticated routes. Your product name, your logo, a neutral description. No page-specific detail whatsoever. This is the one situation where a uniform card across many pages is the correct design, not laziness.

Check it the same way as anything else: curl the URL without credentials and look at what comes back.

Tools and interactive pages

Calculators, converters, generators. The card should say what the tool does and, if the result is shareable, ideally reflect the specific result.

If you generate result URLs, an automatically generated image showing the result is unusually effective here, because the card itself conveys the payload. It’s also the case where per-URL image generation is most clearly worth building.

Error pages and redirects

Two small things worth handling:

404 pages shouldn’t emit tags that make a broken link preview like a real page. A plain “Page not found” title is more honest and more useful.

Redirect targets are what the crawler reads, so the tags that matter live on the destination, not the short or legacy URL.

Where to spend the effort

Rough order, for a typical site:

1. Homepage — most-shared single URL, usually the worst card.
2. The template default — so no page ever has nothing.
3. Authenticated routes — because the failure mode here leaks data, not just quality.
4. Product and pricing — commercially valuable.
5. Articles and docs — per-page text, shared or generated images.
6. Listings — defaults are fine.

Fixing one and two takes an afternoon and covers most of the sharing that actually happens. Everything below that is refinement.