Social sharing previews
Preview image address is not a full URL
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth knowing. Small, or only matters in some cases. Read it and decide.
- Score
- Reported, but it does not lower your site's score.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
When you share a page on social media like Facebook or LinkedIn, those platforms fetch a preview image to show alongside your link. That image address needs to be a complete URL starting with http:// or https://, not a relative path like /images/photo.jpg. Right now, some of your pages use relative paths instead.
Why it costs you
Social platforms cannot reliably find and display your preview image when the address is incomplete. Visitors see no image, or a broken placeholder. A plain text link looks less appealing and gets fewer clicks than one with a proper preview photo. This particularly matters for pages you want people to share, such as blog posts or product pages.
How to fix it
Fix this in your page templates or Open Graph meta tags. Find any og:image tags or social preview settings that contain relative paths—anything starting with / or without a protocol. Change them to full URLs: for example, change /images/preview.jpg to https://yoursite.com/images/preview.jpg. If you use a template system, make this change once in the template file rather than on individual pages, so all pages inherit the correct format.
What the audit tests
- The link preview image address is a full URL, not a path relative to the page
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