Twitter Cards control how your links appear when shared on X (formerly Twitter). There are two main types relevant for most websites.
summary — Shows a small square image (120 × 120) to the left of the text. The title and description appear to the right. This is the compact format. Use it for news articles or content where the image is secondary.
summary_large_image — Shows a large banner image above the title and description, spanning the full card width. The image is cropped to a 2:1 ratio. This format is far more visually impactful and works well for blog posts, product pages, and any content where the image carries meaning.
To implement a Twitter Card, add twitter:card first, then the supporting tags. Twitter falls back to Open Graph tags if the twitter-specific ones are missing, so at minimum you only need to add twitter:card.
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="Your title"> <meta name="twitter:description" content="Your description"> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg"> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@youraccount">
The twitter:site tag should be your Twitter/X account handle. It appears below the card as a subtle attribution and increases trust.
Twitter requires images to be at least 144 × 144 for summary cards and recommends 1200 × 628 for summary_large_image. Images must be under 5MB and publicly accessible — Twitter fetches them at crawl time.