Description
A link shared with no image gets ignored. This plugin shows you, before anyone shares it, exactly what Facebook, LinkedIn, X and WhatsApp will display for a page, and tells you what is missing.
It does not generate Open Graph tags: it checks the ones your site already outputs, whoever put them there. It reads the published page the way a social network does, so it does not care how the page was built: block editor, classic editor, Bricks, Elementor, Divi, a custom theme, Yoast, Rank Math, or nothing at all. If the tags are in the output, it sees them.
Where you find it
- In the admin bar, on any page of your site and on any edit screen, so it works inside page builders too.
- As a panel in the post editor sidebar.
- Under Tools > Social previews, to check the latest published content in one table.
What it checks
- Preview image: missing, relative path, or served over http.
- Title: missing or too long for the platforms to show in full.
- Description: missing, too short, too long, or only inherited from the meta description.
- Twitter card.
- Alt text for the preview image.
- Tags printed twice by the theme and the SEO plugin together, naming which ones.
- Your site name repeated at the end of the title, where the platform already shows the domain.
FAQ
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Does it work with my page builder?
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Yes. It reads the final HTML of the published page, not the editor, so every builder is supported.
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Does it change my site?
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No. It only reads. Fix the issues wherever you set them today: your SEO plugin, your theme or the featured image.
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A page times out
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The plugin waits 30 seconds for your site to answer itself. If a template makes its own remote calls, that can take longer. Raise the wait with the
cardlens_request_timeoutfilter, or better, cache those calls. -
Why does it say the page must be published?
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Social networks can only read a publicly reachable URL, and so does this plugin.
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The preview looks outdated
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Results are cached for five minutes. Use “Check again” in the preview window to force a fresh read. Facebook and LinkedIn also keep their own cache: use their official debuggers to refresh it.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors and Developers
“Cardlens – Social Preview Checker” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Cardlens – Social Preview Checker” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Change Log
0.4.0
- Renamed to Cardlens, a distinctive name for the plugin directory.
0.3.1
- Housekeeping for the plugin directory: standard direct-access guards, and development files kept out of the released package.
0.3.0
- Renamed to Cardlens. The plugin checks what is already published, rather than generating the tags itself, and the name now says so.
0.2.5
- Choose how many items to check: 25, 50, 100 or 200.
- The screen now says how many of your published items it is checking.
- Fixed: titles containing dashes or quotes showed HTML entities.
0.2.4
- Slow pages: the wait is now 30 seconds and filterable with cardlens_request_timeout.
- A timeout now explains what to check instead of showing a cURL error.
0.2.3
- Fixed: the preview window opened but stayed invisible.
0.2.2
- Fixed: rows in Tools could stay on “Checking…” forever.
0.2.1
- Fixed: on WordPress 6.1 and earlier the interface did not load at all.
- Tools > Social previews redesigned: summary counts, thumbnails, progress while scanning and a filter for what needs work.
0.2.0
- Interface rebuilt in React, on the copy of React that WordPress already loads.
- Duplicated tags are now named, for example “og:image x2”.
- New check: site name repeated at the end of the title.
- Issues are listed worst first, everywhere.
- Fixed: the Preview button in Tools could open the wrong post.
0.1.0
- First release.