The fix, in one snippet
<title>Running Shoes for Flat Feet: A Buyer's Guide | Example</title>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
We measure the character length of every title and flag anything outside 25 to 65 characters. That range is a proxy for the pixel width Google actually truncates at, which varies with the characters used: a title of capitals and wide letters is cut earlier than one of narrow lowercase.
The check reports each title with its length so you can judge the borderline ones yourself rather than editing to hit a number.
Why it matters
A truncated title loses its ending, which is usually where the distinguishing detail sits. "Complete Guide to Choosing Running Shoes for Flat Feet in…" tells the reader less than the writer intended, and the cut is invisible in your CMS.
Short titles fail the other way. "Blog" or "Products" describes a section, not a page, and gives the engine nothing to match a query against. Titles under about 25 characters also tend to be duplicated across pages, which compounds the problem.
Google rewrites titles it considers unhelpful, and both extremes make a rewrite more likely. You lose control of the headline exactly where it matters.
How to fix it
Aim for 50 to 60 characters including the brand suffix. Lead with the specific subject, put the brand at the end, and drop filler words:
<!-- 78 characters: the end is cut off -->
<title>The Complete and Definitive Guide to Choosing Running Shoes for Flat Feet</title>
<!-- 54 characters: survives intact -->
<title>Running Shoes for Flat Feet: A Buyer's Guide | Example</title>If a template appends " | Site Name" automatically, count those characters in your budget. For long product names, truncate the variable part rather than the brand, and never truncate mid-word.
Where this fits
Title length outside the useful range is check 7 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Thin content (medium), where pages with very little body text rarely satisfy the query that brought someone to them, and rarely rank for anything competitive. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Title length outside the useful range closes one route in. Immediately below it: Duplicate meta descriptions, where the same description on many pages tells a searcher nothing about which one to open; Heading levels skipped, where heading levels should descend one at a time; Meta description length, where descriptions much shorter than 70 characters waste the space; much longer than 160 are cut off mid-sentence.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Title length outside the useful range (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-title-lengthThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
Sign in with GoogleSigning in is free and takes one click. We store your email address and nothing else.