Twitter / X Card Validator

No. The official Twitter Card Validator at cards-dev.twitter.com/validator had its preview functionality removed in August 2022 and was effectively deprecated through the X rebrand in July 2023. As of June 2026, X provides no official, reliable, public card validator. Threads in X's developer community about replacement tools remain unresolved. Any 2026 SEO blog still linking to the dead URL is out of date. We replicate the documented developer.x.com spec — that's the honest closest thing available.

twitter:* meta tags are still respected by X — they have NOT been deprecated. X has not introduced x:* replacement tags. The standard set remains: twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image, twitter:site (optional), twitter:creator (optional). X also falls back to Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) when twitter:* tags are absent. twitter:card itself has no Open Graph equivalent and must be set explicitly.

Four valid values per the developer.x.com spec: summary (square thumbnail + text, default), summary_large_image (large image card, most common for articles and blog posts), player (audio/video embed), and app (mobile app install card). Most publishers use summary_large_image for editorial content. Setting an invalid value or omitting twitter:card entirely will cause X to fall back to a basic link preview without rich card rendering.

For summary_large_image: minimum 300×157, maximum 4096×4096, recommended 1200×628 (1.91:1) or 1200×675 (16:9). For summary: minimum 144×144, maximum 4096×4096, recommended 240×240 square. Maximum file size 5 MB. Formats: JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF (GIFs render as first frame only). Image URL must be HTTPS — X will reject HTTP images. If your image is below 300×157, X silently downgrades the card from summary_large_image to summary.

X aggressively caches card previews. After updating tags, posting a fresh tweet with the URL is the most reliable way to bust the cache — X re-crawls the URL when the tweet is composed. The previous official validator had a 'refresh preview' button; that no longer exists. Workarounds: append a cache-busting query string (?v=2) to test, or wait — X eventually re-crawls. Some publishers report cache durations of 7-30 days for unchanged URLs.

Yes. twitter:* tags are read primarily by X; og:* tags are read by Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and most other social platforms. X falls back to og:* when twitter:* is missing, but the reverse is NOT true — Facebook and LinkedIn won't read twitter:* tags. The minimum sane setup: og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type, og:url for cross-platform coverage, plus twitter:card (no OG equivalent) for X-specific card rendering. Most modern CMSes and SEO plugins emit both sets automatically.

The X spec uses name="twitter:card" content="...". The Open Graph spec uses property="og:title" content="...". Some CMSes emit twitter:* tags with property= instead of name= — X tolerates this in practice, but strict validators flag it as non-spec. Best practice: use name= for twitter:*, property= for og:*. If you're seeing both attribute styles in a single page, you likely have two conflicting SEO plugins active.

No — we report the recommended dimensions per card type and flag the HTTPS requirement. Actually fetching the image cross-origin and reading its dimensions is unreliable in 2026 because most CDNs block cross-origin image inspection. The image dimension check is reported as INFORMATIONAL with the spec values. The visual preview at the top of the page renders the image directly so you can visually confirm it loads.