My social card struggle with React Helmet

status: fixed

I've been fighting against react-helmet for a while now, and debugging the issue has left me with conflicted views. My SEO knowledge is a bit basic, that might explain why I'm struggling to catch the issue.

I'll break down the article into 2 parts:

The set up of the site
The problem & debugging attempts

1. Site setup

The site is build using GatsbyJS, and has an SEO component that makes use of react-helmet, which is available as a GatsbyJS plugin. There are 5 'hard-coded' pages (404, index, blog, about, contact), and the blog posts are programmatically generated (explained in the Gatsby docs here). The tutorial I followed to implement the SEO component is taken from Gatsby docs.

Relevant file links

Code snippets

The seo component can take the following props:

const SEO = ({ title, description, image, article }) => { ... }

And it also has fallback values, incase I don't pass down all props:

const {
    defaultTitle,
    titleTemplate,
    defaultDescription,
    siteUrl,
    defaultImage,
    twitterUsername,
  } = site.siteMetadata

siteMetadata (containing default/fallback values) in the SEO component comes from the static graphql query:

const query = graphql`
  query SEO {
    site {
      siteMetadata {
        defaultTitle: title
        titleTemplate
        defaultDescription: description
        siteUrl: url
        defaultImage: image
        twitterUsername : author
      }
    }
  }
`

the query gets the data from gatsby-config.js:

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    title: `Goosebumps Collective`,
    titleTemplate: "%s · Goosebumps Collective",
    description: `Freelance Web Development & Curated Music`,
    url: "https://goosebumps.co.zw",
    image: `/goose.png`,
    author: `@txndai`,
  }
}

Default values & react-helmet structure:

const seo = {
    title: title || defaultTitle,
    description: description || defaultDescription,
    image: `${siteUrl}${image || defaultImage}`,
    url: `${siteUrl}${pathname}`,
  }

  return (
    <Helmet title={seo.title} titleTemplate={titleTemplate}>
      <meta name="description" content={seo.description} />
      <meta name="image" content={seo.image} />

      {seo.url && <meta property="og:url" content={seo.url} />}

      {(article ? true : null) && <meta property="og:type" content="article" />}

      {seo.title && <meta property="og:title" content={seo.title} />}

      {seo.description && (
        <meta property="og:description" content={seo.description} />
      )}

      {seo.image && <meta property="og:image" content={seo.image} />}

      <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />

      {twitterUsername && (
        <meta name="twitter:creator" content={twitterUsername} />
      )}

      {seo.title && <meta name="twitter:title" content={seo.title} />}

      {seo.description && (
        <meta name="twitter:description" content={seo.description} />
      )}

      {seo.image && <meta name="twitter:image" content={seo.image} />}
    </Helmet>
  )
}

export default SEO

2. Problem + Debugging attemps

You'd think I have all my bases covered. When I share links to any page on the website, it remains as just a text link, and no card appears. I've tried Twitter, WhatsApp, & Facebook.

When I submit a url on Twitter Card Validator, the log I receive is:

INFO:  Page fetched successfully
INFO:  3 metatags were found
ERROR: No card found (Card error)

I've been receiving that error from the get go (a good couple of weeks at the time of writing), and the case remains the same, as I have just tried this url.

Other social card validators

I've also tried iframely, socialsharepreview, metatags.io - all with fairly positive results, indicating that there's a title, description, & image (all open graph).

The <head> element of all pages seem to have all the meta required, so I can't quite tell where my main issue lies.

Fix

Turns out the fix was as simple as opening tailwind.config.js, and adding purge: ["./src/**/*.js"] in the module.exports object. At some point, after iterating the SEO component further, the error being returned by the Twitter card validator was error "response is too large". This is why you should purge unused classes generated by tailwind.