Shopify Meta Description Length (and Title Limits)

Write Shopify meta descriptions at 150-155 characters and meta titles at 55-60. Those are the lengths Google displays. Shopify's fields will accept far more: 320 characters of meta description and 70 of title.

That gap is the whole problem. The admin lets you write more than twice what anyone will ever read, and gives you no warning at the point where it matters.

How long should a Shopify meta description be?

Three sources, three different numbers, and they are all correct about different things.

The 70 and the 320 are field limits, documented in Shopify's CSV column reference. The recommendation to stay under 60 is Shopify's own, in its guide to search engine listings, where it says plainly: "to avoid shortened titles in search engine results, consider keeping your title up to 60 characters."

So the field limit is not advice. It is the maximum the database column will store. Writing to it produces a snippet that Google cuts in half.

On mobile it is tighter still. Google gives a description roughly 680 pixels there, about 120 characters. If most of your traffic is mobile, the useful part of the sentence has to be in the first 120 characters, and the rest is a bonus for desktop.

Why Google truncates by pixels, not characters

Google never counts your characters. It renders the snippet and cuts it where it runs out of horizontal space, at the nearest whole word, then adds an ellipsis.

That means width, not length, decides. "Illuminating" and "iPhone 15 mini" are the same fourteen characters and nowhere near the same width on screen. A title full of narrow letters survives at 60 characters; one with capitals and wide letters gets cut at 52.

Two practical consequences:

• Character counts are a budget, not a boundary. Sitting at exactly 60 is sitting on the edge of a cliff whose location depends on which letters you used. Aim below it.
• Front-load everything. Whatever gets cut should be the part you would have deleted anyway. The keyword and the reason to click go in the first half.

Worth knowing that Google has never published an official limit for either field, and the pixel figures above are measured by the SEO community rather than documented. They shift when Google changes its result layout, which it does regularly. This is a further argument for writing comfortably inside them rather than optimising to the last character.

What happens if you leave the SEO fields blank

Nothing visibly breaks, which is why so many catalogues never fill them in.

Leave the SEO title empty and Shopify uses the product title. Leave the meta description empty and it falls back to the product description. Both behaviours are documented in the CSV reference: "if you leave this column blank, then the product Title is used as the product's search engine listing page title."

So your search result is never blank. It is just written by whoever wrote your product copy, for a different purpose, at a different length. A supplier paragraph that opens with "Manufactured in accordance with ISO standards" becomes your pitch in Google, cut off mid-word at 155 characters.

A related trap in the CSV. Export a store that has never touched these fields and both SEO columns come back empty for every row. That does not mean four hundred problems to fix. It means four hundred products currently showing their title and description, and the export gives you no way to tell "never written" apart from "deliberately left as is". Check a few products in the admin before running a find-and-replace over the whole file.

Where to edit meta titles and descriptions in Shopify

One product. Open it, scroll to Search engine listing at the bottom, click Edit. You get a live preview of the result, which is the only place in the admin that shows you the truncation before it happens.

Many products. Products → tick the ones you want → Edit products → Columns → add SEO title and SEO description. Shopify's own guidance is to switch to a CSV beyond about fifty products.

By CSV. Export, edit the SEO title and SEO description columns, re-import with Overwrite products with matching handles. The headers are case-sensitive and a near-miss is ignored silently, so your import will report success having changed nothing. Keep the untouched export as your rollback, never edit the Handle column, and test three rows before four hundred.

Collections, pages and blog posts have the same two fields, edited the same way one at a time, with no native bulk equivalent. Collection pages are the ones that rank for category searches, so they are worth an hour by hand even if you never touch the rest.

How to write one that earns the click

Length is the constraint. The content is what decides whether anyone clicks.

The meta title. Product name first, then one distinguishing attribute, and stop. Merino Wool Hiking Socks - Ash Grey beats Buy High Quality Premium Merino Wool Hiking Socks Online. The filler words at the front push the useful part past the cut, and "Buy" and "Online" have never persuaded anyone. Do not add your store name either: the theme appends it.

The meta description. One sentence carrying the strongest concrete reason to buy, then a short call to action. Facts beat adjectives, because a fact is a reason and an adjective is a claim:

Merino wool socks that stay cushioned through twelve-hour days on your feet. Shop the range.

That is 96 characters, well inside the mobile cut, and it says something a competitor's identical page does not.

What to avoid across a whole catalogue: the template. {Product title} - Buy Online | Store Name fills four hundred fields in five minutes and makes every result from your store look like every other one, with the distinguishing detail pushed past the truncation point by the boilerplate at the front.

Will Google use the description you wrote?

Often, but not always, and this is worth knowing before you spend a weekend on it.

Google treats the meta description as a suggestion. When it judges that a passage from the page answers the query better, it uses that passage instead. Studies consistently find it rewrites a majority of snippets, and there is no way to force it not to.

That is not a reason to skip the field. A written description is used most reliably for branded and exact-match queries, which are your highest-intent visitors, and it is the version that appears when someone shares the link. It is a reason not to obsess over each one at the expense of ever finishing the catalogue.

FAQ

What is the ideal meta description length for Shopify? 150-155 characters. Shopify's field accepts 320, but Google displays roughly 155 on desktop and about 120 on mobile.

What is the character limit for the Shopify SEO title? The field accepts 70 characters. Google displays around 55-60, and Shopify itself recommends staying under 60.

Does meta description length affect rankings? No. The meta description is not a ranking factor. It affects click-through rate, which is a different thing that also matters.

What happens if I leave the meta description empty in Shopify? Shopify falls back to the product description, truncated to fit. The result is never empty, just not written for search.

Can I bulk edit meta descriptions in Shopify? Yes. Use the bulk editor with the SEO columns added for smaller batches, or a CSV import with the SEO title and SEO description columns for a whole catalogue.

Should the meta description contain the keyword? Put it in naturally, in the first half. Google bolds matched terms in the snippet, which draws the eye, but stuffing it repeatedly gets the description rewritten rather than rewarded.

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The hard part was never the rule. It is that a four-hundred product catalogue needs four hundred different sentences of about 150 characters each, and a template will not do.

Yikfy writes the meta title, the meta description and the product description together from each product's real data, inside the limits above, and everything lands in a review queue before it reaches your store. If the text already exists somewhere and only needs moving, the CSV route is cheaper, and the four ways to bulk edit product descriptions covers it.