People put a lot of work into making their websites look nice. They pick the fonts, tune the spacing and argue about the shade of a button. Then they forget about the embed.
By the embed I mean the small card that shows up under a link when you paste it into Discord, Messenger or Slack. It has a title, a line of description, sometimes a coloured bar down the left side and a big image. It's usually the first thing anyone sees of your website, and it's the part almost nobody remembers to design.
I forgot too. When I started writing this, I checked what my own essay "On Walking" handed to Discord when someone pasted it. The title said "Stimmie". The description said I'm a software engineer with a lifelong passion for technology, and the picture was a screenshot of my homepage. Nothing on the card mentioned walking. Two more of my older essays previewed the exact same way, because I never gave them their own tags and they fell back to my homepage's. Someone scrolling past would have had no idea the link was an essay at all. I've fixed all three now.
On Walking, pasted into Discord before the fix.
I think it's easy to forget because you never see it while you're building. The embed doesn't live on your page. You write a few meta tags in the head of the page (og:title, og:description, og:image, and theme-color if you want Discord to tint the bar). Then you hand them to an app you don't own, and it draws your card however it likes. If you skip them, nothing breaks and nothing warns you. You only find out when someone else pastes your link.
That would be fine if people clicked through, but most don't. In 2016, researchers at Columbia and Inria followed a month of tweets linking to stories from the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, Fox and the Huffington Post. They found that 59 percent of the links shared in their sample were never clicked at all. A 2024 Penn State study of more than 35 million public Facebook posts found that about 75 percent of shares happened without the sharer clicking the link first. For a lot of people, the embed is the only part of your website they'll ever see.
The fix is cheap. Before you share anything, paste it into a chat with yourself and look at the card. If it doesn't make you want to tap it, it won't make anyone else want to either.
The same link after the fix.
Further reading. Gabielkov, Ramachandran, Chaintreau and Legout, Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter? (SIGMETRICS 2016). Sundar and colleagues, Sharing without clicking on news in social media (Nature Human Behaviour, 2024). Discord's page on link previews, which lists every tag it reads.
Originally published at stimmie.dev. Source and images on GitHub.
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