X (Twitter) Card Guides
Short, specific guides for the people who actually wire up card tags: developers, SEO folks and anyone whose shared link came out wrong.
- Basics
What are X (Twitter) Cards?
X Cards are the link previews X builds from a page's meta tags. How they work, what Twitterbot reads, which tags you need and how to see yours.
5 min read - Card types
X Card types explained
The four X Card types side by side: summary, summary_large_image, player and app, with required tags, image rules and the status of each in 2026.
4 min read - Markup
twitter: vs og: tags: the fallback rules
How X chooses between twitter: and Open Graph tags, which twitter: tags have no og: fallback, name vs property, and the shortest head that still works.
5 min read - Troubleshooting
Why is my X card not showing?
Twelve causes of missing or wrong X (Twitter) cards, in the order worth checking: tags, image URL and size, robots.txt, redirects, firewalls and the card cache.
5 min read - Images
X Card image sizes: the 2026 cheat sheet
Every X Card image rule in one place: 2:1 and 1:1 ratios, minimum and maximum pixels, the 5 MB limit and formats, plus Open Graph sizes for other platforms.
4 min read - Caching
How X caches cards and how to refresh one
Why X keeps showing an old card image or title, how long the card cache lasts, and the reliable ways to get a fresh card without the old validator.
4 min read - WordPress
Add X (Twitter) Cards to WordPress
Set up X (Twitter) Cards in WordPress with Yoast SEO, Rank Math or a few lines of PHP, choose large image cards, and fix the usual caching problems.
5 min read - Platforms
X Cards on Shopify, Next.js and Astro
How Shopify themes, the Next.js Metadata API and Astro output X (Twitter) Card tags, where to set the image and title, and the mistakes specific to each.
4 min read - Platforms
Link previews beyond X: LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Discord, iMessage
Which tags LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Discord and Apple Messages read for link previews, their image sizes and caches, and how to refresh each one.
4 min read - Accessibility
Alt text for card images
How twitter:image:alt and og:image:alt work, the 420-character limit, what to write for photos, charts and title cards, and how plugins handle it.
4 min read - Crawling
robots.txt and Twitterbot
How Twitterbot follows robots.txt, the rule that unblocks it on a locked-down site, and the firewall and bot-protection settings that break cards without warning.
4 min read - Testing
How to test X Cards without the Card Validator
The Card Validator stopped showing previews in 2022. A practical testing routine for X Cards today: composer preview, markup checks, curl, and testing before launch.
4 min read - Writing
Writing card titles and descriptions
X documents 70 characters for card titles and 200 for descriptions. How those limits play out in the current layout, and how to write text that survives truncation.
4 min read
Tools
Card Meta Tag Generator
Fill in a form, get twitter: and og: tags that match, and see a drawn preview in light or dark, desktop or mobile.
Card Preview & Meta Inspector
Paste a page's head HTML. See the card X would likely build, which tags it falls back to, and what is missing.
Card Image Checker & Resizer
Check a local image against card limits: ratio, pixel size, 5 MB, format. Crop to 2:1 or 1:1 and download.
OG Image Maker
Type a title, pick a template and colors, download a 1200x630 or 1200x675 PNG. Drawn on a canvas on your device.
Framework Snippets
Card tags for plain HTML, Next.js, Astro, Hugo and WordPress (Yoast and Rank Math), filled with your values.