Guides

Guide · Launch polish

Remove leftover starter branding: title, icon, share image

Most apps start from a template, and the template leaves its name behind: a tab that says “Vite + React + TS”, a framework logo as the icon, or a share image that isn’t yours. You stop seeing them after a day. Everyone you send the link to sees them first.

Why it matters

These leftovers are the first thing a stranger sees, before your app loads. Google builds the blue link in its results mainly from your page’s <title>, and asks for distinct text that describes each page (Google Search Central). X, LinkedIn and WhatsApp build the preview card from your page’s Open Graph tags, and most of them don’t run JavaScript, so the tags have to be in the HTML itself (Lovable’s docs). None of this is a safety problem. It’s the difference between a link that looks like a product and one that looks like a test.

What counts as a leftover

These are the leftovers our checker looks for in your home page’s HTML:

No title at allGoogle and browser tabs show your address instead.Fix now
A starter title“Vite + React + TS”, “Vite App”, “React App”, “Create Next App”, “Lovable App”, “My v0 App”, “Untitled” and similar.Worth fixing
A starter description“Lovable Generated Project”, “Generated by create next app”, “Web site created using create-react-app”.Worth fixing
The framework’s iconAn icon file named vite.svg, next.svg or vercel.svg.Worth fixing
The builder’s share image or nameA share image served from lovable.dev, the author set to “Lovable”, or twitter:site pointing to Lovable.Worth fixing
No icon, or no share cardTabs show a blank icon; shared links show no title or image.Worth fixing

See it yourself

  1. Open your live site and look at the browser tab. Is that your app’s name, and your icon?
  2. Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to view the page source, then search it (Ctrl+F) for <title>, description, og:image, author and rel="icon". Each one should say your app’s name or point to your own files.
  3. Send the link to yourself in a chat app and look at the preview card. If you changed it recently, the old card can stick around for a while, because platforms cache previews.

Fix it

Everything here lives in the <head> of your page: index.html in a Vite app, or the layout file in Next.js.

  • Title: your app’s name and what it does, under about 60 characters, so Google doesn’t cut it off.
  • Description: one or two sentences, about 150 characters, saying what someone gets from your app.
  • Icon: your own icon, declared with a <link rel="icon"> tag. Delete the framework’s file so it can’t come back. For Google results, use a square PNG or ICO larger than 48×48 pixels; Google lists the formats it accepts, and SVG isn’t one of them (Google Search Central). A new icon can take days to weeks to show up there.
  • Share card: og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url, the four tags the Open Graph protocol requires (ogp.me), plus twitter:card. Make the image 1200×630 and keep it to a few hundred KB.
  • Remove the builder’s name: delete or change author and twitter:site tags that name the tool you built with.
  • On Lovable, its docs say to ask in the project chat, for example to change the site title and generate a new share image; the change reaches your live site on the next publish (Lovable’s docs).

If your page has no title at all, our checker gives you a free fix prompt. This is the same one:

Paste this into Lovable, Bolt, Cursor or Claude Code

Give every page in my app a unique, descriptive <title> under 60 characters that says what the page is and includes my app’s name. Start with the home page.

Ready-made fix prompts for the other leftovers are part of Pro, coming soon. Every problem and what we found stays free.

What this can’t tell you

We read the HTML of the address you check, so other pages can still have starter titles. We see that an icon and share tags are declared, not whether the files load or look right, and we only know the starter names listed above. We don’t look for the “Edit with Lovable” badge: check yourself. Lovable’s FAQ says hiding it is a per-project setting in Project settings › Publishing (Lovable’s FAQ).

Related

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