What is the maximum length of open graph title and description?

What does the internet say?

Before we start exploring different platforms on how much they crop the title and description, let’s ask Google.

The search term og title and og description max length leads to the following recommendation (knowledge graph summary):

As you can see, “the Google-recommendation” is 55-60 character for og:title and 60-56 for og:description. Reading all the pages on the first page of Google gives you very varying responses. This page recommends 50 to 160 characters (well, that is a very large range). Another page gives you 200 characters as upper limit. We have 150-155 characters and 300 characters for Facebook as well.

All response seems to be based on experience-based gut feeling without any reference. Our goal on the other hand is to test different platforms with OGTester to see when they crop the title and description.

What do different social media platform say?

Facebook gives no upper limit, but tells you to write between 2 and 4 sentences. Twitter on the other hand gives you hard limits:

• 200 characters for og:description
• 70 characters for og:title

For the rest of the platform we tested, there were no (official) information.

How did we test?

We created a test link, which gives you a page with a very long og:title and og:description value. We shared the link on different platforms and counted when they crop the message.

A few caveats:

• We tested only simple character lengths (since that is our main use case)
• Adding emoji could decrease this (as some emojis are counted as two character or more) ( just gut-feeling and experience of knowing from other systems)
• This test is mostly outdated if you read it. We recommend you to test with your own title and descriptions.
• We tested the behavior on the web interface.
• Don’t trust us blindly on these numbers, this is what we observed. Your mileage may vary and we are just some random people on the internet.

What is the maximum length on Twitter?

We shared the link Twitter and observed how it was rendered:

On the browser the title is cropped after 47 characters, but in the source code we can observe a longer 97 character long version of the title.

For descriptions, the lengths are 85, respectively 183 characters.

What is the maximum length on WhatsApp?

WhatsApp seems to crop the title and description at 81 character. Whatsapp seems to store internally the full description and title, as the hover message will show the full title and description.

What is the maximum length on Telegram?

Telegram crops the title at 1023 characters and the description at 170:

What is the maximum length on Slack?

Surprisingly, slack does not crop the title and description.

The very long test link is maxed out at 1830 characters for the title and description. We don’t believe any should even have that long title and description, so there was no point to test for larger text.

What is the maximum length on Facebook?

Facebook has a strange behavior. The title is shown up to 122 characters, but the description is hidden. In the source code, you could find a longer title with 247 characters.

What is the maximum length on Signal?

We tested only on the web platform, which seems to crop the text based on your screen size. We could see the title and description getting longer the larger the screen was. Our observation is that it does not crop the title and description.

What is the maximum length on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn seems to crop the title at 119 characters, but then keep 400 characters in the source code. For the description, only the first 69 characters are shown, while 254 could be found in the source code.

In summary

The following table shows a summary of the above results. Just to repeat: Don’t trust these numbers without verifying them yourself.