When someone pastes a link to your help center into Slack, X, LinkedIn or iMessage, the app fetches the page and builds a preview card with a title, a short description and a picture. That picture is your social share image. Helpdesky lets you upload one from the Branding page so every shared link carries your own artwork instead of a generic placeholder.
This guide covers where the setting lives, what file to upload, how to replace or remove it, what people see when you have not uploaded anything, and how to check the result.
Where the social share image shows up
Most chat and social apps read a set of tags called Open Graph tags from the page you share. Helpdesky writes these tags on every public page of your help center and points the image tag at your social share image. You will see the same picture whenever a link is shared on:
- X (Twitter) and LinkedIn posts
- Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams messages
- iMessage, WhatsApp and Telegram chats
- Facebook posts and Messenger
The image is used on every page of your help center: the home page, every article, every category page and author pages. There is one image per help center, not one per article, so pick something that represents your brand rather than a single topic.
The share image only affects link previews in other apps. It does not appear anywhere on the help center itself. For the logo, favicon and colors that visitors see on the page, read Branding Your Help Center.
Preparing your image
The control accepts PNG, JPG and WebP files up to 5 MB. For the best result, follow the sizes that the social networks themselves recommend:
- Dimensions: 1200×630 pixels. This is the size Helpdesky advertises to crawlers, and it is the standard that X, LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack all expect. Other sizes will upload, but the preview may get cropped or letterboxed.
- Aspect ratio: 1.91:1. If you cannot hit 1200×630 exactly, keep the same proportions.
- Safe area: keep logos and text away from the edges. Some apps crop a strip from the top and bottom, and iMessage rounds the corners.
- Legibility: the card is often shown at thumbnail size on phones, so use large type, high contrast and a simple composition. A logo on a solid brand color works better than a busy screenshot.
- File size: stay well under the 5 MB limit. A 1200×630 PNG or JPG is usually between 50 KB and 300 KB.
Animated images and SVG files are not accepted for the share image, and most social networks would ignore them anyway. Export a flat PNG or JPG.
Uploading, replacing and removing the image
Open your dashboard and go to Branding. Scroll to the Social share image section. On the left you will see a preview box shaped like a 1200×630 card. When no image is set it reads No share image.
To upload an image:
- Click Upload image.
- Pick a PNG, JPG or WebP file from your computer.
- Wait for the spinner to finish. The preview box updates with your picture and a confirmation toast appears.
There is no separate save step for this setting. The image is stored as soon as the upload completes, and your public pages start advertising it on the next request.
To replace the image, click Replace image (the same button changes its label once an image is set) and choose a new file. The new image takes the place of the old one straight away.
To remove the image, click Remove. The preview goes back to No share image and your help center falls back to the default described below.
Uploads are tied to your account, so any admin on the helpdesk can upload, replace or remove the share image. The image is served from the same image storage as pictures in your articles. See Uploading Images if you want to know how that storage works.
What appears when no image is uploaded
If you have never uploaded a share image, or you removed it, Helpdesky does not leave the image tag empty and it does not generate a card for each page. Instead, every page advertises a neutral default image at the standard 1200×630 size.
The default is deliberately plain. It carries no Helpdesky branding and no text from your articles, so a shared link still gets a tidy preview card instead of a broken or missing picture. It is a safe fallback, but it does nothing for your brand, which is why we recommend uploading your own image as soon as you set up the help center.
If you use a custom domain, the default image is served from that domain too, so crawlers never have to follow a link to a different host. Read Setting Up a Custom Domain if you have not connected one yet.
Checking how your link looks
The quickest test is to paste a help center URL into a Slack channel or a direct message to yourself. Slack unfurls the link within a second or two and shows you exactly the card other people will see. Posting a draft on X or LinkedIn works the same way.
For a more detailed view, use a link preview tool. These fetch your page, list the Open Graph tags they found and render the card as each network would display it:
- LinkedIn Post Inspector shows the LinkedIn card and lets you force a fresh crawl.
- Facebook Sharing Debugger does the same for Facebook and Messenger, and has a Scrape Again button.
- OpenGraph.xyz previews several networks side by side without needing an account.
Test more than one page. Because the same image is used across the whole help center, check the home page, one article and one category page to confirm they all show the picture you expect.
Previews are cached, so give changes time
Social networks and chat apps store the preview the first time they see a URL and reuse it for hours or days. If you upload a new image and a link still shows the old picture or the neutral default, the network is almost certainly showing you a cached copy rather than fetching your page again.
A few ways to speed things up:
- Use the Scrape Again or Inspect buttons in the Facebook and LinkedIn tools above to force a recrawl of a specific URL.
- In Slack, paste a link you have not shared before. Slack caches per URL, so a fresh article link often shows the new image while an old link keeps the cached card.
- Add a temporary query string such as
?v=2to the end of the URL when testing. The network treats it as a new address and fetches it again.
Everyday users sharing your links will start seeing the new image as the caches expire, usually within a day. You do not need to do anything else on the Helpdesky side.
Next steps
Upload a 1200×630 image on the Branding page now so that every help center link your customers share carries your brand. Then round out the rest of your look with Themes, Colors, and Appearance, and read SEO Tools and Optimization to make sure your pages are just as polished in search results as they are in link previews.