How to fix missing og description on BigCommerce
Add an og:description meta tag to every page so social platforms display a compelling preview when your store's links are shared.
Steps for BigCommerce
- BigCommerce uses Handlebars templates. Open your control panel and go to Storefront → My Themes → click 'Advanced' → Edit Theme Files (or download the theme to edit locally).
- Open templates/layout/base.html (or the equivalent head partial in your theme) and locate the Open Graph block.
- Add or confirm this line exists inside <head>: <meta property="og:description" content="{{#if page.meta_description}}{{page.meta_description}}{{else}}{{settings.meta_description}}{{/if}}">
- For individual products, go to Products → Edit a product → scroll to 'Search Engine Optimization' section → fill in the 'Meta Description' field; this value is exposed as page.meta_description in templates.
- For categories: Products → Product Categories → select a category → fill in 'Meta Description'.
- Save and publish the theme, then validate with Facebook Sharing Debugger.
<meta property="og:description" content="Handcrafted leather wallets built to last — shop bifolds, cardholders, and money clips with free shipping over $50." />What is missing og description?
The og:description tag is a small piece of HTML that tells social networks — Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, iMessage, and many others — what text to show beneath your page title when someone shares a link. It is part of the Open Graph protocol, a standard originally created by Facebook and now used across virtually every social and messaging platform. Without it, those platforms either scrape random text from the page or show nothing at all, resulting in unappealing, confusing link previews. Think of it as writing the caption for your own story before someone else writes it for you.
When customers share a product or category page on social media without an og:description, the preview looks bare or shows irrelevant boilerplate text — which dramatically reduces the chance someone clicks through. Studies consistently show that rich, well-written link previews generate far more clicks than bare URLs, directly affecting referral traffic and sales. For ecommerce stores, social sharing is a meaningful free-traffic channel, and Pinterest and Facebook in particular use the Open Graph tags to populate shoppable pins and ads; missing tags can break or degrade those integrations. While og:description is not a direct Google ranking signal, higher click-through rates from social traffic indirectly reinforce your site's authority and revenue.
See the complete Missing og description guide for every platform and the full background.
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