What this check inspects
Shipwork reads the title, the meta description, the canonical link, the robots meta value and the Open Graph and Twitter tags from the page. It reports a missing title or description as an error, a title over 60 characters or a description over 160 as a warning, a missing canonical as a warning, incomplete Open Graph as informational, and a noindex value as a warning.
What a failure means
A missing title or description is an error: the engine writes its own from page content, which is usually worse than yours. Over-length tags are warnings because the tail is cut off in results. Incomplete Open Graph means shared links lose their title, description or image.
How to fix it
- Write one unique title per page, front-loading the words that distinguish it.
- Keep titles near 60 characters and descriptions near 160 so nothing important is truncated.
- Make sure a theme or app is not appending the store name to every title until they all look the same.
- Fill in og:title, og:description and og:image so social and chat previews are controlled.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA theme appends the store name and a tagline to every product title, so each one gains 38 characters on top of an already descriptive title.
What the check reportsThe check reports titles over 60 characters on the pages it checks. In search results the distinguishing part, the product name, is what gets cut off.
The pointTruncation removes the useful half. Shorten the title field itself rather than relying on the engine to trim from the end.