Fixing “Title/Description Too Long” Warnings

What This Warning Means

Search engines only display a limited number of characters for a page’s title and description in search results. Anything beyond that gets cut off, often mid-word, which looks unpolished and can hide your keywords or call to action from searchers.

SureRank flags a page when:

• The search engine title exceeds 60 characters
• The search engine description exceeds 160 characters

This is a warning, not an error. The page isn’t broken and will still be indexed. It’s simply a recommendation to improve how the page appears in search results, not something urgent.

Why It Happens

This usually comes from one of two places.

A per-page override. A specific SEO Title or Meta Description was typed directly into that post or page’s SureRank SEO popup, and it’s too long.

The global title/description template. If no per-page override is set, SureRank falls back to the site-wide template (for example, %title% %sep% %site_name%). If that template plus the resolved variables (post title, site name, and so on) adds up to more than the limit, every page using the default template will show this warning.

How to Fix It

If It’s a Single Page

1. Open the post or page and click the SureRank icon to open the SEO popup.
2. Go to the General tab.
3. Check the character counter under the SEO Title and Meta Description fields. Aim for under 60 characters for the title and under 160 characters for the description.

4. Shorten the text, keeping the most important keywords and information near the front.

If It’s Happening Across Many or Most Pages (Template Issue)

1. Go to SureRank → General →Meta Templates →Title & Description (or the relevant Home Page or post-type template settings).
2. Look at the title/description template and the variables it includes.

3. Shorten the template itself, or remove a variable that’s pushing it over the limit. For example, a long site name combined with a long separator and page title can add up quickly.

A Quick Way to Check

The SEO popup’s SERP preview shows exactly how the title and description will look in Google’s search results, including where the cutoff happens. Use it to judge length rather than just counting characters.

If That Doesn’t Work

If the counter shows the text is under the limit, but the warning still appears, or if the length looks correct visually but the warning persists, this may indicate a caching issue or a stale check result. Ask for the site URL and the specific page, so support or engineering can look into it.