Search
Titles are a sensible length
seo.title-length
Why this matters
Google cuts titles off at roughly 600 pixels — about 60 characters — so the end of a long title never gets read. Very short titles waste the most valuable line of text you get in a search result.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
Minutes
Care needed
Low risk to change
How to fix it
Aim for 50–60 characters, with the distinguishing words first so nothing important is cut off.
On your platform
WordPress
Edit the search-result title in your SEO plugin rather than the post title — changing the post title changes the heading on the page and every link to it. If many pages are long in the same way, the cause is the plugin's title template appending your site name to everything; shorten that once and it fixes them all.
Shopify
In the search engine listing section of each product, page or collection, which counts characters as you type. If every title is long, look at the title line in `theme.liquid`, which appends the store name to each page.
Drupal
Change the pattern on the content type in Metatag rather than editing pages one at a time. A token pattern of the node title plus a short site name fixes a whole content type at once.
Joomla
The Browser Page Title on the menu item or article. If everything is long, the cause is Global Configuration → Site → Site Name in Page Titles, which adds the site name to every page on the site.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 8 points off your search score. It is a fact about your site rather than a measurement, so it reads the same on every scan until you change something.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 106. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther search checks
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Content has been updated recentlySome content is meant to sit still, and age alone is not a fault. But prices, opening hours and staff pages that have not been touched in over a year are usually wrong by now — and a visitor who acts on the wrong opening hours does not come back to check whether the rest was right.
- Descriptions are a sensible lengthLong descriptions get truncated mid-sentence; very short ones waste the space you are given.
- Each page has exactly one title tagA page can only have one title. When there are several, the browser and Google each pick one — and they do not always pick the same one, so what you see in the tab may not be what appears in search.
- Each page has one main headingSeveral top-level headings makes the structure of the page ambiguous. Worth checking rather than urgent — modern HTML permits it, and Google handles it, but it usually signals that headings are being chosen for their size.
- Every page has a main headingThe h1 is the headline of the page. Without one, both visitors skimming and search engines parsing the page have nothing telling them what it is about.