Web Links has a free API service that allows you to get a JSON response for any URL. Facebook's server automatically grabs the title, description, and picks a thumbnail image from the original website. Building features is expensive. However, building reliability is even more expensive. The battle-tested service will politely inspect any requested URL and return JSON formatted summary with a title, description and preview image. You can use CORS or JSONP requests to bypass the same-origin policy in your front-end application.