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Title and meta description length checker
Character counts are the wrong unit and everybody uses them anyway. Search results allocate width, so “Windows” takes far more room than “illicit” at the same nine characters.
This measures both: the exact character count, and an approximate pixel width, for the title, the description and the Open Graph tags.
What the numbers mean
Title, about 580 pixels. Past that a desktop result trims with an ellipsis. Mobile gives a little more in practice. Roughly 60 characters of ordinary prose fits.
Description, about 920 pixels. Roughly 160 characters. Google sometimes shows much longer snippets and sometimes much shorter, depending on the query.
Pixel widths here are an approximation from the shape of the characters, not a rendering in Google's exact font. Treat them as a better guide than counting characters, not as a guarantee.
Writing ones that survive
Front-load. Whatever gets cut should be the part you would not miss. Brand name at the end, not the start.
One page, one promise. If two pages could honestly share a title, they are competing with each other and should probably be one page.
Say the thing. “Pricing” is a category. “Pricing: what a scan of 5,000 pages costs” is a page.
Do not pad to hit a number. A 40-character title that is exactly right beats a 59-character one with a comma and two keywords bolted on.
Every page, not this one
Titles go wrong in bulk: a template emits the same title on 400 pages, or a migration leaves half a section with none at all. Checking them one at a time will not find that.
A crawl lists every missing, duplicate, short and long title and description across the whole site, which turns this from a spot check into a work queue.
Questions people ask
- How long should a title tag be?
- Aim for 30 to 60 characters. The real limit is width, not characters: a desktop result gives a title about 580 pixels, so a title of capitals and wide letters gets cut sooner than one of narrow ones. Put the words that matter first and the truncation stops mattering.
- How long should a meta description be?
- Between 70 and 160 characters, or roughly 920 pixels. Google rewrites descriptions most of the time anyway, usually because the page has a better sentence for the query than the one you wrote. Write it as a promise about the page rather than a keyword list and it survives more often.
- Does the meta description affect ranking?
- Not directly. It affects whether anybody clicks, which is the only reason it matters, and that is reason enough. A missing description lets the engine pick a sentence from the page, and it picks badly on pages that open with boilerplate.
- Why does Google show a different title from mine?
- It rewrites titles when it thinks the page has a better one, usually from the H1 or the site name, and most often when the title is stuffed, duplicated across pages, or says nothing about the page. A clear unique title is rewritten far less.
Other free tools here
- Canonical tag checker — Find the canonical a page declares, in the HTML and the headers, and check it against the URL that served it.
- Image alt text auditor — List every image on a page with its alt text, and pick out the ones that are missing, empty or useless.
- robots.txt tester — Read a site’s robots.txt, say whether a URL is allowed for Googlebot, and flag the directives that do nothing.
- All the free tools — one page each, no account on any of them.
- Download a whole crawl as SQLite — when one page is not enough and you want the data itself.