You've written a perfect meta description — informative, keyword-rich, compelling. Then Google truncates it with "..." because you went four characters over the limit. Or you've crafted the ideal post only to find you're 15 characters over. Character counting is one of those unsexy but genuinely useful skills. Here's everything you need to know.
Why Character Counts Matter
Platforms and systems impose limits for specific technical and UX reasons. Exceed them and your content is cut off, rejected, or reformatted. Stay well under them and you waste available space. Our word and character counter measures text instantly — paste and get the count. For related content work, our text case converter handles capitalisation formatting.
SEO: Meta Titles and Descriptions
- Meta title: approximately 50-60 characters (Google displays ~580px width, roughly 55-60 chars)
- Meta description: approximately 150-160 characters desktop, 120 characters mobile
Exceeding these limits doesn't break anything — Google truncates with "...". But you lose control over what searchers see. Write to the limit. Primary keyword early in both.
Social Media Limits
- X (Twitter): 280 characters
- LinkedIn posts: 3,000 characters before "see more"
- LinkedIn headlines: 220 characters
- Instagram captions: 2,200 max; first ~125 visible without expansion
- YouTube descriptions: 5,000 max; first 125 visible
SMS: The Technical Reality
Standard SMS: 160 characters per message using GSM-7 encoding. Messages above 160 characters are split into multiple parts (each 153 characters due to concatenation headers). Unicode characters — including emoji — reduce the limit to 70 characters per message. For bulk SMS, character counting directly affects cost.
Other Practical Limits
- Email subject lines: no hard limit, but ~60 characters is the inbox preview cutoff
- URL slugs: best practice under 75 characters
- Alt text: no hard limit, but 100-125 characters is best practice
- UCAS personal statement: 4,000 characters
Tips for Writing to Limits
- Write freely first, then edit down — far easier than building up to a limit
- Cut adverbs and filler phrases ("very", "in order to", "due to the fact that")
- Use contractions — "don't" saves 3 characters vs "do not"
- Check character count before publishing, not after
Further reading: Moz provides regularly-updated guidance on meta description length for SEO. Read Moz's meta description SEO guidance.