Search4 min read
Why Your Link Preview Looks Different on Mobile
The same link renders two different cards. Facebook gives a title 88 characters on desktop and about 65 on a phone — and the phone is where most of the taps are.
A link preview on mobile is drawn from the same Open Graph tags as the desktop one, but the card is narrower, so the platform crops the title harder and shows less of the description — or none of it. A title that reads perfectly at your desk can be cut mid-word for most of the people who actually see it.
FreeMentioned in this article
Link Preview DebuggerWhat X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.What each platform shows in a mobile link preview
Approximate, because every platform varies its crop with device width, font size and the reader's accessibility settings. Treat them as planning limits, not guarantees.
| Platform | Desktop title | Mobile title | Description on mobile |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~88 characters | ~65 | One line | |
| ~100 | ~60 | None — LinkedIn ignores it entirely | |
| X | ~70 | ~50 | None on the large image card |
| ~40 | ~40 | Shown on the closeup | |
| WhatsApp, Telegram | ~65 | ~65 | ~100 characters |
Two of these deserve attention. LinkedIn ignores
og:description on every surface, so the title carries the entire card — which makes LinkedIn the platform where a vague title costs the most. And X drops the description on the large image card, which is what most links produce, so the description you carefully wrote is invisible to the largest share of the audience.Why the crop differs at all
The card is a fixed proportion of the column, and the column on a phone is roughly a third the width of a desktop feed. The platform does not reflow the card; it allocates the same one or two lines and fits fewer characters into them.
That is why the failure is silent. Nothing errors, nothing is missing from the tags, and the desktop preview — the one you checked — is correct. The phone is simply a different render of the same data, and it is the render the majority of your audience gets.
Writing a title that survives both
One rule does most of the work: put the point in the first fifty characters.
- Fifty characters or fewer survives every platform on every surface.
- Sixty-five is safe on Facebook and the chat apps.
- Anything past seventy is decoration on mobile — write it for the reader who taps
through, not for the one deciding whether to.
- Never end the first clause on a preposition or a dangling name. "How to fix a link
preview that…" reads as broken; "Fix a broken link preview" does not.
The description is a different calculation. It is worth writing well for the chat apps, which keep 100 characters or more, and it is worth accepting that Facebook shows one line on a phone and LinkedIn shows none. Front-load it exactly as you would the title. Open Graph tags covers the tags themselves and which platform reads which. If you want the count as you type, the social media character counter tracks every surface at once.
Meta documents its own crop and image behaviour in the Sharing best practices guide.
Check the mobile card, not the desktop one
Every platform's own debugger shows you a desktop render, requires you to be logged in to that platform, and shows a different subset from the others. Checking a link properly that way is four logins and four tabs, and none of them shows you the phone.
The link preview debugger fetches the page once and draws every platform's card twice — desktop and mobile — from the tags it finds, including the fallbacks each platform applies when a tag is missing. If the card is wrong on both, the tags are the problem and link preview not showing is the post to read next; if Facebook is showing an old version of a card you have already fixed, Facebook link preview not updating covers the cache.
Can I set a different title for mobile?
No. There is one set of Open Graph tags and every surface reads the same ones. The only lever is writing a title short enough to survive the tightest crop you care about.
My mobile preview shows no image at all.
Check the image is at least 1200×630 and under about 8 MB, and that it is reachable without a cookie or a login. Some platforms silently skip an image they cannot fetch quickly rather than reporting a failure.
Does the crop change with the reader's font size?
Yes. A reader using large text sees fewer characters again, which is another argument for a short first clause rather than a title tuned to a specific limit.
Why does LinkedIn show no description?
It does not read og:description at all, on any surface. The title and the image are the whole card.
Run the URL through the link preview debugger and read the mobile rows first — they are the ones that decide whether the link gets tapped.
Put it to work
Tools for the job you just read about
Free to run, most of them without an account.
FreePreviews
Link Preview Debugger
What X, Facebook and LinkedIn will show when you share your link.
Preview the URL →11 runs
FreePreviews
Google SERP Snippet Preview
See your title and description as a Google result — on a desktop and a phone.
Preview →5 runs
FreeUtilities
Social Media URL Cleaner
Strip the tracking off a link — and see what each parameter was telling somebody.
Clean →1 runs
FreeAnalytics & growth
Instagram Money Calculator
What to charge for a post — priced the way a brand actually prices it.
Calculate →
FreeUtilities
Username Availability Checker
One handle, checked against every network’s rules at once.
Check →
FreeUtilities
YouTube Metadata Viewer
Every field a YouTube video declares about itself, in one table.
View metadata →
Keep reading
More from the blog
Search3 min read
Facebook Link Preview Not Updating: The Cache
Facebook caches what it read the first time. Here is why a fixed page still shows the old image, and the ways to force a re-scrape.
Search4 min read
Link Preview Not Showing: The Ordered List of Causes
A link preview not showing is almost always one of six things. Here they are in order of likelihood, each with the check that confirms it.
Search4 min read
Meta Description Length: What Google Actually Shows
Google gives a desktop snippet two lines and a phone three. The useful target is one clear promise inside about 155 characters — and Google may still use a passage instead.