Auto Generate Social Cards on your Gatsby Website

So, a few months back I was building my portfolio site which you are in right now. Almost everything was completed, integrated blog, added some SEO stuff (although I'm very bad at it).😳 While I was checking the preview of my site on twitter I noticed that preview wasn't that good — it was just a blank link with some meta-description. I used to think Twitter would automatically generate social cards for my site 🤪.

I used to see dev.to articles shared quite often on social media, which previewed social cards with author name, title, social media links, neat background with focused title.

Hmmm.. then I started looking at some Gatsby plugins 🖱️, I found some good ones but I didn't really like them tbh. They require a lot of configuration which I didn't want to do. I was searching for the plugin with minimum configuration requirements, ideally setup one time and leave it for rest of my life ! 🚀🔥

I bumped into this awesome article where Jason describes How to generate social image using Cloudinary. Luckily he created npm package get-share-image so I don't have to write everything from scratch.So, in this article I wanna share my experiences around how I integrate it in my site, especially where I have to address two big things :

Generate social cards for website pages like home, contact.
Generate social cards for blog pages that means I have to generate title dynamically for each pages.

Before we start

Before we get started we need to setup just a few things:

🚨 Signup for Cloudinary account with this link. — It's absoultely free, and using affiliated link will also help creator of package.

We are going to use package get-share-image to generate the social cards using Cloudinary API.

Installation

First let's install the required packages.

# install using npm
npm install --save @jlengstorf/get-share-image
 
# install using yarn
yarn add @jlengstorf/get-share-image

You should also install react-helmet as we will be injecting cards as Seo using this plugin.

We will be using Gatsby site as the example in this project you can use it with CRA or in Next.js site too. You can see the the example used in this site source code and follow along.

Usage

Now you must have the cloudinary name which is the username you entered while creating your account. Check that by going to console of cloudinary account . I prefer to put it as env variables but there is no harm in exposing to the user.

Now go to media library section, create directory named portfolio and upload the cover photo and name it website-card (convention). You can use the same photo for blog too but we are going to upload next one with and name it blog-card (convention).

My cover photo looks something like this : 👇

I recommend you to put much cover photo as blank as possible with some social link so that there will be ample space for text.

In the file where you put all your SEO objects *(commonly Seo.js)*import the hooks provided by package and pass object as parameter as below. At first we are going to create social image for overall website so,

import getShareImage from "@jlengstorf/get-share-image";
 
const socialImage = getShareImage({
  title: "Aadarsha Acharya",
 
  cloudName: "YOUR_CLOUDINARY_NAME",
 
  imagePublicID: "portfolio/website-card",
 
  font: "futura",
 
  textColor: "232129",
});

It will return the URL of website-card from cloudinary for the website pages.

You can modify and add the above properties by checking the options in the docs , I've added a bit more in my site check source code here.

For individual blog post we are going to create another variable to store the url for the blog-post .Lets write code for that too.

const socialImage = getShareImage({
  title: metaTitle,
 
  tagline: metaKeywords.map((tag) => `#${tag}`).join(" "),
 
  cloudName: "YOUR_CLOUDINARY_NAME",
 
  imagePublicID: "portfolio/blog-card",
 
  font: "futura",
 
  textColor: "232129",
});

You can modify and add the above properties by checking the options in the docs , I've added a bit more in my site check source code here.

You have notice two major object properties in above code that's title and tagline. What's that ? 🤔 These are dynamically generated tags & title for each blog post. Honestly, I've to make new post regarding SEO using Helmet which isn't possible in this post. You can check source code I'm pretty sure you will get it. 🧠

Rendering Cards Conditionally

Pass isBlogPost={true} or isBlogPost={false} as props to SEO component from every component that's using Seo.js.

Inside Seo functional component check the below condition to choose which card to use between blogPostCard or websiteCard:

const socialImage = isBlogPost ? blogPostCard : websiteCard;

Almost done

Now use it everywhere you can 😹 😹 (joking). Pass the following props in the Helmet component.

<Helmet
  meta={[
    {
      name: `image`,
      content: socialImage,
    },
    {
      property: `og:image`,
      content: socialImage,
    },
    {
      name: "twitter:image",
      content: socialImage,
    },
  ]}
/>

This will inject the card images as the content in meta tags... we are done ! 🤙

Test the above work by deploying the site in production environment ( this won't work in dev environment).

Adding more features

You might encounter some problems yeah, I also felt same, feel free to drop comment if you face any issue. I will be happy to help you.

Also, learn by reading source code, docs. Check below resources & source code of production site using this package to explore more and customizing it.

🔥 Docs :

https://github.com/jlengstorf/get-share-image

🔥 Production sites :