If you write text on the internet, sixty characters is a magic number. Not exactly sixty — somewhere between fifty and sixty-five, depending on the surface — but close enough that "the 60-character rule" is a useful shorthand.
The surfaces that truncate at roughly sixty characters:
- Google search results titles (truncated at ~60 chars on desktop, fewer on mobile).
- Email subject lines in most inbox clients (truncated at ~50-60 chars in Gmail, slightly more in Outlook).
- Tweet text if you want it RT-able with a sentence prepended (~60 chars leaves you room).
- Open Graph titles when shared on Twitter/LinkedIn cards (truncated at ~60-70 chars).
- Browser tab titles when you have multiple tabs open.
- Meta descriptions are slightly different (155-160 chars) but the discipline is the same.
If you write a headline that's seventy characters long, a meaningful chunk of the people who'd see it in any of these contexts will see only the first sixty. The last ten characters will get the "..." treatment, and your point — which probably lived in those last ten characters — will be lost.
Why this matters more than people think
Most marketers know the rule abstractly but don't apply it consistently. They write a 75-character title because they like it, and they assume the truncation will land somewhere harmless. It almost never does. The truncation usually lands mid-word, mid-clause, mid-thought. The version that gets read is half a sentence with no clear meaning.
The discipline is to write as if every word past sixty will be cut. The cut might be on Google, in an inbox preview, on a tweet quote, in a tab strip. You don't know where the cut will fall in any specific reader's view; you do know the cut will fall.
So you write to fit, deliberately. The most important word goes early.The brand goes at the end (so if it's truncated, the meaning still survives). The point — the actual claim — goes in the first forty characters.
A worked example
Imagine you're writing the title for a blog post called "How we approach photography for businesses with no budget for a shoot."
The title's ninety-six characters. On Google, it'll show as: "How we approach photography for businesses with no budget for a shoo..." — the punchline ("a shoot") gets cut, leaving a sentence that ends with "shoo".
Trim it: "Photography without a shoot — for small business websites." That's 56 characters. The whole point lands; the brand context is implied; nothing gets truncated. Better.
You can almost always trim a 90-character title to 55 with a little work. The trim usually improves the title, because the trim forces specificity.
What the rule changes about writing
Three habits, in increasing order of effect:
Word economy. When you know you've got sixty characters, you choose words carefully. You drop "and", you contract verbs, you swap multi-syllable Latinate words for shorter Anglo-Saxon ones. "Methodology" becomes "way." "Implementation" becomes "build." "Optimization" becomes "tuning." The prose gets shorter and clearer at the same time.
Front-loading the point. The most important word goes first. If your headline is "We help small businesses build websites that actually convert," put "Websites that convert" at the front. The reader who only sees the first sixty characters has to get the point.
Cutting the brand. If your brand has to be in the title — and on a Google result it kind of does, for trust reasons — put it at the end as a suffix. "Pricing | ThemeSmith" not "ThemeSmith - Our Pricing Page". The version that gets truncated still ends with the brand; the version that gets read still gets the point.
The honest weakness
Writing to 60 characters is a constraint, and constraints sometimes squeeze out genuinely useful nuance. A 80-character headline that perfectly captures something important is better than a 55-character headline that flattens it.We don't apply this rule rigidly to body copy or pull-quotes or section subheads, where the surfaces don't truncate.
It applies to the truncation surfaces — titles, subject lines, social-card titles. For those, the constraint is real, and writing to it is a craft skill worth practising.
A quick test for any title you write
Open the title page on Google's search-result preview tool, or just paste it into a text editor and count characters. If you're over sixty: 1. Identify the most important word in the title. 2. Move it to the front. 3. Drop everything past character sixty. 4. Reread. Does the truncated version still convey the point? 5. If yes, you can leave the longer version (Google will truncate, but the meaning survives). If no, rewrite to fit.
This takes about ninety seconds per title. The conversion-rate impact of titles that truncate well is meaningful— there's enough data on this from the SEO industry to make it worth doing.
It's also good editorial discipline. A writer who can't say their point in sixty characters often hasn't worked out what their point is.