Visual Link Preview

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.

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

1. 

   Add a visual link with live preview to any post or page

2. 

   Example of what the default template looks like in a post

3. 

   Use our settings to easily style the link to match your website

4. 

   Link to your own posts or to any external URL

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