FastOG — Dynamic Social Cards & Link Previews for WooCommerce
FastOG — Dynamic Social Cards & Link Previews for WooCommerce
Description
Fix ugly, cropped product previews on WhatsApp, iMessage and LinkedIn.
A shared link with no card is a link nobody clicks — and the card most stores get is
worse than none: a stretched logo, a badly cropped product photo, or an empty grey
box. When someone shares your store on WhatsApp, iMessage, LinkedIn, Facebook,
X (Twitter), Slack or Telegram, that platform has to pick an image for the post.
Your theme gives it one, and your SEO plugin gives it the same one for every product.
FastOG gives every share a designed card built from that page’s real content, the
moment the link is shared:
- Automatic live prices and sale badges on social shares. Product covers draw the
price from your catalogue, so the number in the preview is the number on the page —
including a sale badge when the product is discounted. -
A designed card per page type, not one image reused everywhere:
- Product pages — product photo, name, live price and sale badge.
- Product categories — the category image and title.
- Shop / front page — your brand and tagline.
- Blog posts — title, excerpt and featured image.
-
Zero server load — 100% offloaded rendering. Covers are rendered and cached by
FastOG andog:imagepoints at that cache. Your host never runs a headless browser,
never stores a generated image, and never eats the bandwidth of a social crawl.
Nothing to manage, and nothing to re-export when a price changes.
What you get
- No manual design work. No Photoshop, no Canva, no designer backlog. Pick a
starting look in FastOG Studio and covers build themselves from your catalogue. - Prices that stay current. Cards come from live product data, so a price change or
a new sale badge appears on the next share — not on a stale image cached months ago. - Covers that never go stale. A cover’s URL contains the settings that produced it,
so editing a cover produces a new URL and social platforms fetch the new image instead
of showing the old one. No cache-busting hacks, no “scrape again” instructions. - The Facebook preview refreshes itself. Every platform caches link previews, and
Facebook keeps its copy until something tells it the page changed — which is why an
edited cover commonly shows up on Facebook as the old image for weeks. FastOG tells
it. Saving a product asks Facebook to re-scrape that page, so the new card goes live
without you opening the Sharing Debugger. - What we cannot refresh, we say out loud. Facebook is the only platform that lets
anyone ask for a refresh. On WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X and the rest we can only make sure
the correct image is waiting for their next read — when they take it is their
schedule, not ours. We would rather tell you that than sell you a promise we cannot
keep. - No GD, no font uploads, no rewrite endpoints. Because we render, your server needs
no image library, no fonts to install and no/social-image.jpgendpoint that 404s —
the failure modes that make self-hosted image plugins collapse on ordinary hosting. - Plays nice with your SEO plugin. If Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO or SEOPress
is active, FastOG hands its cover to that plugin instead of printing a competing tag
that social crawlers might ignore. One image, one set of tags, no conflict. - Preview the cover where you edit the product. The product editor has a FastOG
panel showing this product’s live cover and letting you pick its template without
leaving the product screen. The Products list gains a Social cover column so you
can see the state across the catalogue at a glance. - Black Friday and Seasonal Offer WooCommerce product templates. Both looks are
available for product covers on every plan. Savings display only when the original
price is higher than the current price. - Tells you if a cover stops being served. A daily check reads your storefront the
way a crawler does, and if a theme change or another plugin quietly stopped the FastOG
image it says so in wp-admin. The same state appears under Tools Site Health and
in WooCommerce Status for whoever is debugging. - Works with or without WooCommerce. WordPress alone gets front page and blog post
covers. Add WooCommerce and product, category and shop pages get theirs too. - Translated into 27 languages, with nothing to install. The plugin’s screens and the
Studio editor ship with their translations already inside: Portuguese (Portugal and
Brazil), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish,
Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Chinese (Simplified and
Traditional), and the Nordics and Central Europe too. WordPress uses whichever language
you set under Settings General; a partly translated language falls back to English
string by string rather than breaking a screen. The full list is under “Is FastOG
available in my language?” below. - One clear plan ladder, no watermark. Every plan covers product, collection, home and
blog-post pages, with live prices, sale badges and stock badges. Community is free for up
to 100 items and includes four base templates plus the Black Friday and Seasonal Offer product templates. Starter ($19/month) covers 250
items with 22 curated templates and rating badges. Pro ($49/month) covers 1,000 items and
adds all 44 selectable templates, the Custom Builder and metafield mapping. Scale
($119/month) adds unlimited item coverage, scoped rules and priority rendering. Black Friday
and Seasonal Offer are available at every tier; savings appear only when the original price is
higher. No plan adds a watermark. - Served from our infrastructure, not yours. Renders happen on our own render
service and are delivered from our own cache and edge, never from your hosting and
never through a third-party image CDN you have to wire up and monitor. We own the
serving path, the bandwidth and the uptime; your site only signs a URL.
Start free
Community tier — free forever, no watermark. Connect your site and cover up to 100
store items across product, collection, home and blog-post pages. Community includes four base
templates plus the Black Friday and Seasonal Offer product templates, live prices,
sale badges and stock badges. Paid plans expand coverage and template choice; the
watermark is not a tier feature.
- FastOG Service Terms: https://fastog.com/terms
- FastOG Privacy Policy: https://fastog.com/privacy
- Service Pricing & Plans: https://fastog.com
Which pages get a cover
The four page types above. Every other URL — pages, tags, date and author archives,
custom post types — is left exactly as it was, so your theme or SEO plugin keeps
control of it. FastOG only touches the shares that benefit from a designed card.
License
The code in this plugin is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License
v2.0 or later — see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html. That license is required
to distribute through WordPress.org, and it covers the PHP, JavaScript and CSS in this
package only.
FastOG itself is not open source. It is a hosted commercial service: covers are
rendered and served by FastOG under the FastOG Service Terms (https://fastog.com/terms).
The GPL grants no rights over the FastOG service, its API, its templates or its other
integrations.
Installation
From zero to a shared, designed card in about two minutes:
- Upload the
fastog-for-woocommercefolder towp-content/plugins/, or install
the plugin from the admin. - Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen.
- Open FastOG Studio Setup and follow the three steps: connect this site,
choose which page types get a cover, and pick a starting look. Activation
itself contacts nothing — connecting is the step that does.
Connection requires a publicly reachable HTTPS WordPress REST API so FastOG can
verify control of this site before issuing credentials. - Open Studio to see the covers. Every starting look stays editable there.
WooCommerce is optional: without it, FastOG covers your front page and blog
posts. Product, product category and shop covers need WooCommerce.
The first FastOG Studio screen shows sample product, sale, collection and shop
covers before connection. These are fictional examples; your catalogue is not
read until you start setup.
Screenshots
Product cover — photo, name, price and a sale badge that updates automatically.
Product shot cover — the standard product-card look.
Collection cover — category image and title.
Promo / launch cover — your brand on every share.
Faq
Most stores ship no Open Graph image for product and category pages, so social
platforms fall back to a logo or a blank tile. FastOG prints a designed og:image
for every page type, so every share gets a card worth clicking.
That is the usual symptom: the platform crops whatever image it was given to 1200×630.
A product photo that is square or tall gets its sides or its top cut off, and a logo
tile gets stretched. FastOG serves a card already composed at 1200×630 with the product
photo fitted inside it, so the platform has nothing left to crop.
Yes. Product covers are drawn from live catalogue data, so the price on the card matches
the price on the page, and a discounted product gets a sale badge. Every plan draws these
fields — they are never locked to a higher tier. If a price changes after a link was
shared, the next share draws the new price.
On Facebook, FastOG already handled it: the plugin registers WooCommerce’s own product
webhooks, so saving a product asks Facebook to re-read that page and the new card
normally replaces the old preview within seconds. You do not need the Sharing Debugger.
If Facebook is still showing the old card, press Purge caches on the FastOG Studio
screen and confirm the product’s page itself is serving the new og:image.
WhatsApp, LinkedIn and X are a different story, and we will not pretend otherwise: none
of them lets anyone request a refresh, so we cannot push one. What we can do is make
sure the right image is waiting — cover URLs change with the cover, so their next read
gets the new card. When that read happens is up to them; LinkedIn and X typically
re-read within about a week. Their own inspectors (LinkedIn Post Inspector, X Card
Validator) can nudge that if you are in a hurry.
Facebook, and only Facebook, because it is the only one that offers a programmatic
refresh — that is what FastOG calls when you save a product. Every other platform either
caches a preview we cannot reach (WhatsApp keeps it in the recipient’s app) or exposes
no way to ask at all (LinkedIn, X). Those follow their own schedule, and a share that
was cached before your edit can keep showing the old card until they re-read.
Not for the covers themselves. Without WooCommerce, FastOG covers your front
page and blog posts from WordPress data alone. WooCommerce adds the storefront
page types: product, product category and shop covers read your catalogue, so
those three need it installed and active.
No. Covers are rendered and cached on FastOG and served from there, so your
server only signs a URL — there are no images generated or stored on your hosting
and no impact on page speed.
FastOG does. If Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO or SEOPress is active, we do not
print a competing <meta property="og:image"> — a second one does not override the
first, it competes with it, and social crawlers take the first they find. Instead
your FastOG cover is handed to that plugin, so it prints our image with its own
title, description and URL. Without an SEO plugin, FastOG prints the full set of
Open Graph and Twitter card tags itself.
No. The editor’s script and stylesheet are bundled inside the plugin and served
from your own site. The only requests that leave your server are the FastOG API
calls the Studio editor makes when you open it.
Only after you explicitly choose Start setup. Activation and ordinary
admin page loads do not contact FastOG.
No. Only a site-level profile (site name, site URL, WordPress/WooCommerce/PHP
versions and locale) is sent when you connect. No customer, order, or other
personal data is transmitted.
FastOG also verifies site control through a one-time proof challenge. The temporary
proof secret is sent only over HTTPS and discarded after verification.
On FastOG. og:image URLs point at FastOG, so your site doesn’t need extra
storage or a CDN.
One HTML comment above the social tags — <!-- Social card by FastOG --> with our
URL — so anyone reading the page source can see where the og:image host comes from.
It is a comment: nothing is added to what visitors or crawlers see, no request is
made, and it is stripped of anything that could become markup.
Turn it off on FastOG Tools Page source: the switch is in wp-admin, costs
nothing, and no plan changes with it. If you would rather not have the setting on the
screen at all, define('FASTOG_WC_ATTRIBUTION', false); in wp-config.php or
add_filter(‘fastog_wc_head_attribution’, ‘__return_empty_string’); in a small plugin
also removes it.
Paid plan trial availability is shown in the checkout flow. Community is free forever
and does not require Stripe Checkout. Pricing and plans are at https://fastog.com/plugin-pricing.
Yes — the plugin is translated into 27 languages: Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch,
Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian,
Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Chinese in both its
Simplified and Traditional forms.
These translations ship inside the plugin, so they work on any install with no extra
step: WordPress uses the language you set under Settings General. If WordPress.org
has a language pack for your locale, that pack is used instead of the bundled copy, so
corrections made on
https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/fastog-for-woocommerce/ arrive
without waiting for a release. A language that is only partly translated falls back to
English string by string rather than breaking a screen. If yours is incomplete and you
would use it, say so on the support forum — that is what decides which language gets
attention next.
Yes. Community is free forever, covers up to 100 items across all four page types, and
renders clean covers without a watermark. It includes four base templates plus the Black
Friday and event-agnostic Seasonal Offer product looks, live price and sale badges, and stock badges. Starter adds 22 curated templates and rating
badges; Pro adds the Custom Builder and metafield mapping; Scale adds scoped rules and
priority rendering. Community does not require Stripe Checkout.
No. Until you finish it, FastOG points Studio and Plan at Setup so nothing
half-configured goes live — and Skip setup for now lifts that immediately.
Tools is never held back: that is where you reconnect or disconnect.
Cover URLs contain the settings that produced them, so editing a cover produces a
new URL. A page cache can keep serving the old one — press Purge caches on the
FastOG Studio screen. After that, Facebook is refreshed for you (saving a product asks
Facebook to re-read the page); WhatsApp, LinkedIn and X pick up the new image on their
own next read.
Deleting the plugin removes everything it stored on your site, including its access
key, from every site on a multisite network. Your store record and cover images on
FastOG stay in your FastOG account, where you can delete them; covers already
shared in social posts keep working until that record is removed.
No. The stored credentials (API key, secret and tier) are migrated automatically,
so there is nothing to re-enter.
Reviews
It solved the problem, improving social covers a lot
By 
I installed FastOG on my WooCommerce store to improve how products look when I send links to customers on WhatsApp. The cards look flawless, and the price is visible right away. It works perfectly and was super easy to set up!
Changelog
0.26.1
- A store whose signing secret drifted now repairs itself. Every cover a storefront prints is
signed with the store’s own secret, and the plugin could previously only RECEIVE that secret at
registration. If the local copy ever went stale, the plugin kept signing correctly and FastOG
kept rejecting every image — the merchant saw broken previews while both halves looked healthy,
and the only remedy was finding and pressing Reconnect. The daily background refresh now adopts
the pair FastOG reports as authoritative, so a drifted store converges on its own: no merchant
action, no reconfiguration, and no change to any cover URL.
0.26.0
- New Page source switch on FastOG Tools: the one-line credit that names FastOG above your
social tags can now be turned off in wp-admin, on every plan, without editing a config file or
adding a filter. It was always a comment — no link, no badge, and nothing visitors or crawlers
see changes either way. - The plugin’s 27 translations now ship inside it. A directory install only receives a language
pack once that locale’s translations have been imported and approved on translate.wordpress.org,
and until that happens a store had no translations at all while this repository had 27 of them.
The bundled catalogues are the floor; a language pack still wins when one exists, so corrections
made on translate.wordpress.org keep arriving without waiting for a release. - Retired templates are never offered again. The setup wizard and the product-screen template
picker now read the bundled catalogue’s retired list instead of a hand-kept one, which is how the
wizard had been pre-selecting a retired layout for blog posts and the picker offering slugs the
server no longer ships. A store already using such a cover keeps it: retired templates stay
renderable, they are just not offered. - The translation template is regenerated with every release, and the plugin’s own strings are now
visible to WordPress.org’s string extractor — the Studio’s ~90 labels were previously invisible to
it, so no translator could claim them.
0.23.1
- Report the installed plugin version from the daily refresh, so FastOG sees an update even
when no administrator opens wp-admin, and a stale version is visible instead of silent.
0.22.0
- Refined the Studio dashboard with a smaller responsive preview and clearer controls.
- Aligned Tools, Plan and Support pages with the Studio layout; clarified connection
actions, plan features and support guidance. - Translated the Scale plan’s priority-rendering feature across all plugin locales.
0.18.1
- Verify control of the WordPress site before registration or reconnect. Reconnect
now runs through a capability- and nonce-protected wp-admin action.
0.17.0
- Added Black Friday and Seasonal Offer product templates to the Studio picker on every
plan. Seasonal Offer uses a Christmas wreath; discounts display only when compare-at
pricing confirms a real saving.
0.6.0
- A review ask, shown once: a week after connecting, with setup finished and
nothing wrong, FastOG asks for a wordpress.org review on its own screens and
the Plugins list. The link opens the reviews form with no rating preselected,
a support link sits beside it, and dismissing it is permanent.
0.1.0
- Initial release: connection to FastOG, Open Graph and Twitter card tags for
product, product category, shop/front page and blog post pages, hand-off to
installed SEO plugins, and the FastOG Studio admin screen.