Visual Link Preview

by Brecht

Description

Easily create a Facebook-like link preview for any link on your website. You can choose the image and text to display and create your very own custom template. The default template can be styled from the settings to match your website.

Some examples of what you could use this for:

A call to action for your affiliate links
Promote WooCommerce products on your website
List sources for your article
A weekly posty of interesting websites you’ve found
Link to related posts on your own website
…

It does not require any database lookups, which means even having many of these blocks on a page should not affect performance.

Compatible with both the Classic and Gutenberg Block Editor using shortcodes and blocks.

Need help?
Check out our documentation!

This plugin is in active development. Feel free to contact us with any feature requests or ideas.

Installation

Upload the visual-link-preview directory (directory included) to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Check out our getting started documentation

Screenshots

Add a visual link with live preview to any post or page
Example of what the default template looks like in a post
Use our settings to easily style the link to match your website
Link to your own posts or to any external URL

Faq

Where can I find the documentation?

All documentation can be found in our knowledge base.

Do you offer any support?

Yes! We pride ourselves on offering awesome support and almost always answer support questions within 24 hours. Send us an email at support@bootstrapped.ventures whenever you have a question or suggestion!

Reviews

Great plugin - exactly what I needed

By redpandazine on August 25, 2025

As someone who curates content regularly, this plugin is really what I've been searching for. Thank you for it!

Terrible product design

By michaelzfreeman on July 7, 2025

Functionally this is good but no where are we told that the plugin uses Microlink API which has a limit of 50 requests per day. They don't inform the user of this. Neither do they put up a message telling the user the limit has been reached !

This plugin is amazing!

By Dan Greene (dgreene423) on May 28, 2025

I had been using a different plugin's pro version (Inline Related Posts). But the site I was using it on is very large, 38 thousand posts and counting, and that plugin's performance was becoming extremely erratic.
All really needed was a plugin that would let me search for the post link I wanted to add, pull its title, image, and excerpt into a block, and add some custom styling. Visual Link Preview does exactly that! Thank you for making this plugin

Must have to show a press review !

By clinicien on September 11, 2024

I've looked for this kind of plugin for a while and this one does perfectly what it has been designed for.
Thank you very much !

Nice, but lacking

By audunmb on January 26, 2024

The idea is great, but there are several shortcomings. * Lacks basic localisation stuff like using translate files for “read more”-buttons (they’re in the standard wordpress translations, just add ‘wordpress’ after the string). Having to build a new template simply to translate a button is annoying.   Edit: this is fixed :)   * It’s not possible to add new blocks in templates. This limits severely the types of templates one can create, and the usefulness of this plugin. Edit:   As for custom blocks, I mostly want to add a "Read more about this" to the top of template.   Though, I wished that template building was similar to normal block editing. So instead of custom settings, I could use the default block editor to set typography, colors, margins, padding, border etc. That of course means to rewrite much of the plugin, but it would probably be better in the long run. First it would be consistent with the rest of WordPress. It would also fix any responsivity issues (as the theme would handle that) and make it easier to create nice designs (using cover block for instance would be nice) for the users.

Impressive plugin!

By Jimmy Lee (shirtguy72) on December 29, 2023

Super nice plugin, thank you! 5-Stars!

This plugin is fantastic!

By ste_yeu on December 6, 2023

I was searching for a solution that could auto get images and content from external websites, and this plugin works great for this!

Congralutations to the developer!

Limitations

By xolde on November 4, 2023

Doesn't work with Elementor

Tam Aradığım Eklenti

By kaptaninyeri on September 23, 2023

Eklentiyi Oluşturana Teşekkürler 🙂

Good

By Tae Hyeon (laetitiatistory) on September 2, 2023

It really works and you can customize it easily
This plugin deserve more attention

Changelog

2.2.9

Improvement: Choose how visual links should render inside RSS feeds

2.2.8

Fix: Prevent potential misuse of shortcode by authors
Fix: Only output link in RSS feed

2.2.7

Improvement: WordPress 6.8 compatibility
Fix: Loading translations too early

2.2.6

Fix: Deprecation warning

2.2.5

Improvement: Use default translation for “Read More” in spotlight template
Fix: Gutenberg deprecations

2.2.4

Fix: Internal link select in WordPress 5.9

2.2.3

Fix: Prevent users without the right capabities from being able to use our AJAX actions

2.2.2

Fix: Block not rendering in WordPress 5.8
Fix: Template issues when using different templates on the same page

2.2.1

Fix: Breaking class call when using custom styling
Fix: Prevent PHP notices because of non-static functions

2.2.0

Feature: New “Compact” link template
Feature: New “Spotlight” link template
Feature: Template Editor for link templates
Feature: URL block in the Template Editor to show domain or full url
Feature: Optionally set your own Microlink API key
Improvement: Remove jQuery dependency
Improvement: Better compatibility with TwentyTwenty theme
Fix: Sanitization for summary field
Fix: Stuck in loading if fetching of external link data not working

2.1.1

Fix: Prevent PHP notices for incomplete shortcodes

2.1.0

Feature: Set nofollow and open in new tab for VLP Block
Feature: Set custom link class for VLP Block
Feature: Ability to use shortcode directly for advanced purposes
Improvement: Keep image size consistent
Improvement: Layout on mobile
Fix: Browser freezing when trying to load information from some URLs

2.0.2

Improvement: Convert paragraph and shortcode block
Fix: Image not removing correctly in Classic Editor

2.0.1

Fix: Some blocks not showing preview in Gutenberg
Fix: Default image size in template causing PHP notices

2.0.0

Feature: Easily change template style from settings
Feature: Automatic content in Gutenberg block
Feature: Automatic summary for internal links
Improvement: Better Gutenberg block with preview

1.3.3

Fix: Bug introduced in 1.3.2 when creating in Gutenberg

1.3.2

Fix: Summary not getting saved correctly upon edit
Fix: HTML code showing in summary

1.3.1

Improvement: Convert shortcode to Gutenberg block
Fix: WordPress 5.0 compatibility

1.3.0

Feature: Fetch information from external link using Open Graph

1.2.2

Improvement: Gutenberg 3.3 compatibility

1.2.1

Improvement: Gutenberg 2.6.0 compatibility for the VLP block

1.2.0

Feature: New block for Gutenberg compatibility
Feature: Use nofollow and open in new tab for external links
Improvement: Better handling of encoding

1.1.2

Fix: Prevent overwriting first link in post when editing a newly added link

1.1.1

Fix: Problem with encoding unicode characters

1.1.0

Feature: Template system

1.0.0

Very first version of this link preview plugin