Shopify SEO title length: how long is too long, and what gets cut off
Last updated: 31 July 2026
Shopify has two separate title fields, and conflating them is the source of most confusion. The product title is what shoppers see on your storefront. The SEO title, in the collapsed SEO section, is what search engines show as the clickable headline. If you leave the SEO title empty, Shopify falls back to the product title.
That fallback matters when auditing: Shopify stores an SEO title identical to the product title as empty, meaning "use the default". An empty SEO title is not necessarily a mistake — but an overlong one always costs you.
How long is too long
Google truncates by pixel width rather than character count, so there is no exact limit. In practice titles start getting cut around 55–60 characters on desktop, and less on mobile. Catamend flags SEO titles over 60 characters as seo_title_too_long.
Being truncated is not a ranking penalty. The cost is that the end of your title — often the part that distinguishes the product — is replaced by an ellipsis, and any words after the cut do nothing for the click.
What long titles usually look like
The pattern is almost always the same: a real title with promotional boilerplate appended. Something like "Linen Cushion Cover | Buy Online | Free Shipping | Best Price Guaranteed | Store Name" carries perhaps thirty useful characters and fifty wasted ones.
- Put the distinguishing words first — material, model, size.
- Drop "buy online", "best price" and similar filler. It occupies the space that could describe the product.
- Brand name at the end is fine, but it is the first thing to lose when you are over.
- Do not repeat the category three times in different phrasings.
How Catamend handles it
The seo_title_too_long rule reports products whose SEO title exceeds the threshold, which is configurable per shop if you want to be stricter or looser than 60 characters.
Catamend also has a companion rule, missing_seo_title, whose fix generates a title from the product and clips it to 60 characters so a generated title is never itself too long. As with the other SEO fixes, it writes only where the field is empty and records the before and after.
Check your own catalog
Catamend scans every product and variant against 23 checks like this one, ranks what it finds by impact, and applies the safe fixes in one click with a full before-and-after history. Install Catamend from the Shopify App Store.