When you migrate off WordPress, your Open Graph and Twitter card tags do not carry over on their own, because they were emitted by your SEO plugin, so the new site has to output them again or your links will share with no image or the wrong one. Each page needs its og:title, og:description, and og:image, plus the Twitter card equivalents, with the og:image pointing at an absolute URL that actually resolves on the new site. The common failure is an og:image still pointing at an old media path that moved in the migration, so the preview breaks. There is also caching to handle: social platforms remember old preview data, so after launch you rescrape key pages, for example with Facebook’s Sharing Debugger, to refresh them. WPBuildAI re-emits Open Graph and Twitter card tags per page with absolute, resolving image URLs, and flags the pages to rescrape, so shared links keep showing the right title, description, and image.
Open Graph tags are markup your plugin produced
The starting point is knowing where these tags came from. Open Graph tags, defined by the Open Graph protocol, and the Twitter card tags are lines in each page’s head that tell social platforms what title, description, and image to show when someone shares the link. On WordPress they were almost certainly generated by your SEO plugin, not written by hand, which means they are configuration produced by software rather than content stored in the page. So when the software goes, the tags go with it unless the new platform is set up to emit them. That is why they do not travel like your body text does, and why re-emitting them is a deliberate step in the rebuild, closely tied to exporting your Yoast metadata so the values are known.
The absolute-URL trap that breaks previews
The most common way previews break in a migration is a broken image URL. og:image must be an absolute, publicly reachable URL, and if it still points at an old media path that moved when you migrated, the platform cannot fetch the image and the preview falls back to nothing or something generic. This is the same class of problem as any broken link after migration, applied to the preview image rather than a page link. So when you re-emit the tags, make sure each og:image points at an image that actually resolves on the new site, and confirm the images themselves migrated, which overlaps with whether images keep their SEO. A tag that references a missing file is worse than no tag, because it looks configured but produces nothing.
Re-emit the full set per page
A complete rebuild outputs the whole set of sharing tags on every page that needs them. That means og:title, og:description, and og:image, plus og:type and og:url, and the Twitter card tags so previews look right on that platform too. Meta’s sharing documentation lists what each platform reads. Give a specific image to the pages where sharing matters, such as articles and product pages, and set a sensible site-wide default for the rest so nothing shares blank. Because a migration is fundamentally a careful site move, treating these tags as part of the metadata to carry across, rather than an afterthought, is what keeps shared links looking intentional.
Clear the cache with a rescrape
Even after you emit correct tags, shared links can keep showing the old preview, because social platforms cache what they fetched before. That cache is why a page you just fixed still shares with the wrong image. The fix is to rescrape the key pages after launch using the platform’s tool, such as Facebook’s Sharing Debugger, which refetches the page and refreshes the stored preview immediately. You do not need to rescrape everything; focus on your most-shared pages and let the rest refresh naturally over time. Knowing about the cache prevents the false alarm of thinking your new tags did not work when they simply have not been refetched yet.
Steps to handle Open Graph in a migration
- Note your existing tags and images while you still have the WordPress data.
- Re-emit og:title, og:description, og:image, and Twitter card tags per page.
- Use absolute, resolving image URLs so no preview points at a moved file.
- Set per-page images where sharing matters and a default elsewhere.
- Rescrape key pages with the platform debuggers after launch.
- Test a real share of an article, product, and the homepage to confirm previews.
Worked example: fixing blank shares after launch
Consider a publisher whose articles were widely shared on social platforms. After migrating, an editor noticed a freshly shared article showed no image, just a bare title. The cause was quick to find: the new pages emitted og:image, but the URLs still pointed at the old /wp-content/uploads/ paths, which no longer resolved. The rebuild was corrected to output og:image at the new, resolving image URLs, the team rescraped the top articles in the Sharing Debugger to clear the cached blank previews, and shares immediately showed the right image, title, and description again. Because they tested a real share rather than trusting the markup, they caught it in hours instead of watching weeks of link-shares look broken.
Limitation: tags control the preview, not whether people share
It is honest to bound this. Correct Open Graph tags make shared links look right, but they do not drive traffic by themselves or affect your Google rankings; they shape the preview, not the demand. The images also add weight, and images are already the heaviest part of most pages, as Web Almanac 2024 shows, so use reasonably sized preview images rather than enormous ones. And platform caches clear on their own timeline, so rescraping is about speed, not necessity. Treat this as making sure your shares look intentional, which is worth doing, without expecting the tags to do more than that.
Key points
When you migrate off WordPress, your Open Graph and Twitter card tags do not carry over, because your SEO plugin produced them, so the new site must emit them again per page. Give each page og:title, og:description, and an og:image at an absolute URL that resolves, since the classic failure is an image tag still pointing at a moved media path, which breaks the preview. Set per-page images where sharing matters and a default elsewhere, then rescrape your key pages with the platform debuggers after launch to clear cached previews. Remember the tags shape how a share looks, not whether people share or how you rank, and keep preview images sensibly sized. WPBuildAI re-emits Open Graph and Twitter card tags per page with absolute, resolving image URLs, and flags the pages to rescrape, so shared links keep showing the right title, description, and image. Send your web address for a free analysis.
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