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.
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
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- Visual Link Preview
Installation
- Upload the
visual-link-previewdirectory (directory included) to the/wp-content/plugins/directory - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- Check out our getting started documentation
FAQ
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Where can I find the documentation?
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All documentation can be found in our knowledge base.
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Do you offer any support?
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Yes! We pride ourselves on offering awesome support and almost always answer support questions within 24 hours. Send us an email at [email protected] whenever you have a question or suggestion!
Reviews
clinicien
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 !
<!– wp:paragraph –>
<p class=””>The idea is great, but there are several shortcomings.<br>* 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. </p>
<!– /wp:paragraph –>
<!– wp:paragraph –>
<p class=””>Edit: this is fixed :)</p>
<!– /wp:paragraph –>
<!– wp:paragraph –>
<p class=””>* 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.<br><br>Edit:</p>
<!– /wp:paragraph –>
<!– wp:paragraph –>
<p class=””>As for custom blocks, I mostly want to add a “Read more about this” to the top of template.</p>
<!– /wp:paragraph –>
<!– wp:paragraph –>
<p class=””>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.<br>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.</p>
<!– /wp:paragraph –>
shirtguy72
December 29, 2023
Super nice plugin, thank you! 5-Stars!
ste_yeu
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!
Doesn’t work with Elementor
kaptaninyeri
September 23, 2023
Eklentiyi Olu?turana Te?ekkürler ??
Contributors & Developers
“Visual Link Preview” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Visual Link Preview” has been translated into 3 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Visual Link Preview” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
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