Discord is one of the most active platforms for link sharing, yet its embed behavior is different from Facebook or Twitter in ways that trip up even experienced publishers. Here's what you need to know to get your links rendering perfectly in Discord — and what to do when they don't.
How Discord Fetches Previews
When someone pastes a link in Discord, the platform fetches the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags — specifically og:title, og:description, and og:image. Unlike Facebook, Discord does not cache images aggressively — it re-fetches every time, which means fixes propagate almost immediately. The flip side: Discord's scraper is strict about what it accepts, and it has a much lower tolerance for slow responses than you'd expect from a chat app.
Recommended OG Image Size for Discord
1200 × 630 pixels, same as the standard. Discord supports PNG and JPEG up to 8 MB — that 8MB cap is a hard limit, and images that exceed it get dropped entirely, not downscaled. Unlike Twitter's card, Discord does not crop the image — it shows the full rectangle, so you don't need to worry about a mobile crop zone the way you do on Facebook. What you do need to worry about is fetch speed: Discord skips the preview if the image takes too long to load, so keep the file size reasonable (under 300KB is safe) and make sure your CDN doesn't rate-limit or challenge the scraper's user-agent.
Discord-Specific Tips
- Use a clear title: Discord displays
og:titleprominently as a blue link. Make it compelling — it's the most visible part of the embed. - Keep descriptions short: Discord truncates after roughly 300 characters. Put the key info first; anything after the cut is invisible.
- No favicon required: Discord adds a small site icon next to the title if you provide a favicon, but the embed works fine without one.
- Embeds respect the 8MB image cap: If your image is 9MB, Discord shows the title and description but no image. Check file size before you blame the tags.
- No public debugger: Discord doesn't offer a validator like Facebook's. Test by pasting the link into a private server or DM. If nothing renders, wait a minute and paste again — Discord sometimes delays the first fetch.
Common Discord Preview Failures
- Preview doesn't appear at all: Usually a missing og:image or a blocked scraper. Check that your CDN (Cloudflare, etc.) doesn't challenge Discordbot's user-agent — this is the #1 cause we see.
- Image appears but title is wrong: You have multiple og:title tags, or the page's HTML title is overriding it. Consolidate to one og:title.
- Description is cut mid-sentence: Normal — Discord truncates ~300 chars. Rewrite the description so the first 300 chars stand alone.
- Video links show a generic card: Discord doesn't render og:video embeds inline the way it does images. For YouTube links, Discord uses its own YouTube integration instead of your OG tags — nothing you can change there.
Test Before You Share
Because Discord has no debugger, build the test into your publishing flow: paste the URL into a scratch channel before broadcasting it to a large server. If the embed looks right there, it'll look right everywhere in Discord. And if you're managing multiple links, our free OG checker shows you exactly what tags Discord will read — catch the missing og:image before your link lands in a server with ten thousand members.