Custom Open Graph Image Generator for WordPress

The brief

Develop a custom WordPress plugin that allows website administrators to easily create and manage Open Graph images for sharing content on social media.

Open Graph images determine how website pages appear when shared on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte. Creating these previews manually can be time-consuming, particularly for websites with frequently updated content.

The client needed a flexible solution that would automatically generate social media preview images while allowing administrators to customise their appearance through a visual template builder.

The main challenge was to make image generation independent of the website’s hosting environment, ensuring the solution could be used across different WordPress installations without requiring complex server configurations.

What we did

Developed a custom solution consisting of two interconnected components: a WordPress plugin and a separate backend service responsible for generating images.

The WordPress plugin provides an administrative interface where users can create and customise image templates, controlling how text and visual elements appear in social media previews.

The backend service handles image generation through an API, processing requests from the plugin and producing images based on the configured templates.

This architecture separates image processing from the WordPress installation, reducing dependency on individual hosting environments and allowing the generation functionality to operate independently.

We also implemented several key features:

• Visual template builder: Allows administrators to customise the appearance of Open Graph images.
• Automatic image generation: Creates social media previews based on predefined templates.
• Multiple platform formats: Supports image generation for Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte.
• Open Graph metadata: Automatically generates the necessary OG meta tags.
• Yoast SEO integration: Provides compatibility with the popular WordPress SEO plugin.

The solution was designed to integrate into existing WordPress websites without requiring changes to their core content management workflows.

Why it mattered

Social media previews play an important role in how website content is presented when shared across different platforms.

Without an automated solution, maintaining consistent preview images can require significant manual effort, especially for content-heavy websites.

The custom plugin simplifies this process by allowing administrators to configure reusable templates and generate images automatically.

For website owners, this means greater control over how their content appears on social platforms, while reducing the time spent preparing individual preview images.

Separating image generation into an independent backend service also makes the solution less dependent on specific WordPress hosting configurations, providing greater flexibility across different projects.

The result is a reusable WordPress plugin that MANU continues to maintain and implement across its own projects and client websites.