A product title too long to be read

The symptom

“Premium Handmade Baltic Wool Throw Blanket 130x170 cm Soft Warm Scandinavian Style for Sofa Bed Couch Living Room Gift Idea”

Titles like this are written for a search box, not a reader. They come from marketplace habits, where keyword stuffing in the title once worked, and from import feeds that concatenate every attribute they have.

What it costs

The title is the single most reused string in the store. It appears in the category grid, the search results, the cart, the order confirmation email, the invoice, the product feed and the browser tab. It has to work in all of them, and a long one works in none:

• Search results cut it. Google truncates around 580 pixels, roughly seventy characters. What survives is the beginning; what is dropped is often the size, the material or the model number — the part the customer was searching for.
• The category grid cuts it harder. Most themes clamp product titles to two lines. On a phone that is about forty characters.
• It breaks documents you do not control. Invoice templates, packing slips and marketplace feeds each have their own limit, and each cuts at a different place.

How to check it yourself

wp db query "SELECT ID, CHAR_LENGTH(post_title) AS znakow, post_title \
  FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product' AND post_status = 'publish' \
  AND CHAR_LENGTH(post_title) > 70 ORDER BY znakow DESC"

Replace wp_ with your table prefix. Read the longest twenty first — the tail of this list is usually one import behaving badly rather than a hundred separate decisions.

How to fix it

1. Put the identifying words first. Brand, product, the one attribute that distinguishes it. If the title is cut at seventy characters, make the first seventy the useful ones.
2. Move the rest into fields that exist for it. Dimensions belong in attributes, material in attributes, the sales language in the description. All three are indexed; none of them has to fit in the title.
3. Do not repeat the variation in the parent title. ”…S M L XL” on a variable product is the dropdown’s job.
4. If a feed generates the titles, fix the template rather than the products.

When it is a false positive

• Categories where the long name is the real name — industrial parts, chemicals, books with subtitles, spare parts identified by a full compatibility string.
• B2B catalogues searched by internal code, where nobody arrives through a search engine and the title exists to be matched exactly.
• Stores with a custom SEO title set separately from the product title. If your SEO plugin writes a shorter <title>, the search-result argument does not apply — though the grid, the invoice and the feed still use the long one.

How Merchlint finds it

Merchlint measures post_title in characters for every published product, and reports anything over seventy. Where an SEO plugin stores its own title, Merchlint reads that too and says which of the two is actually used in the page <title> — so a product with a well-written SEO title and a long internal name is ranked as the minor finding it is.

The finding shows the title with the seventy-character cut marked, so you can see exactly what a search result would drop.

Confidence: F — fact from the database. A string is longer than seventy characters or it is not. Where to cut it is your decision; that it will be cut is not.

This check ships in the Pro add-on.