Shopify Product Title Tag Truncated? How Liquid Builds It, and the Fix

Written by Ram Kr Shukla, SEO and growth consultant

Google cuts long titles. That part’s normal. What isn’t normal is a title that already ends mid-word in your page source, before Google has touched it.

That’s what I found on an Indian cosmetics store running Shopify. All 12 of its highest-impression product URLs had title tags whose text before the brand suffix was 69 or 70 characters long. Every one stopped mid-word. The H1 on the page carried the same cut string. And the bit that got chopped was the shade, the one word that tells one product from its siblings.

This guide is the Shopify mechanics behind that: where the title tag and the H1 come from in Liquid, how a truncate filter produces the cut, what Google actually shows, a title formula that keeps the differentiator, and how to audit and fix a whole catalogue without touching products one at a time. It sits in my Shopify SEO library. If you want the wider product page checklist, the 12 elements of product page SEO covers title formulas in a paragraph. This post goes into the code.

How Shopify Builds a Product Title Tag

Three layers feed the <title> element on a product page. Most stores only ever look at one of them.

Layer 1, the product title. The Title field at the top of the product in admin. Shoppers see it as the product name in collection grids, the cart and order emails, and in most themes it’s the H1 as well.

Layer 2, the SEO title. Further down the product page, the Search engine listing section has a Page title field. Shopify’s Help Center says you can enter up to 70 characters there and suggests keeping to 60 to avoid shortened titles in results. Behind the scenes the value is stored as the title_tag metafield in the global namespace, according to Shopify’s developer docs. Leave the field blank and the page falls back to the product title.

Layer 3, the theme. Liquid in layout/theme.liquid takes the page_title object and wraps it in the title tag. Shopify documents the pattern on its theme SEO metadata page, and the free Dawn theme ships almost exactly this:

<title>
  {{ page_title -}}
  {%- if current_tags %} | tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif -%}
  {%- if current_page != 1 %} | Page {{ current_page }}{% endif -%}
  {%- unless page_title contains shop.name %} | {{ shop.name }}{% endunless -%}
</title>

Two things fall out of those five lines. First, page_title is whatever the SEO title field holds, or the product title when that field’s empty. Second, the store name gets appended after it unless the title already contains it. So a 70-character SEO title turns into 70 characters plus a pipe plus your store name. The counter in Shopify admin never sees that suffix.

Either separator is fine for Google. Its title link documentation suggests putting the site name at the start or end of the title, split off with a hyphen, colon or pipe.

Where the H1 comes from

The H1 isn’t in theme.liquid at all. It lives in the product section, usually sections/main-product.liquid. In Dawn it’s a plain <h1>{{ product.title | escape }}</h1>. No SEO field involved. The H1 prints the product title even when you’ve written a separate SEO title.

That split matters for every fix later in this post. Edit the SEO field and only the title tag changes. Edit the product title and the H1 changes too, along with every grid card, cart line and email that prints the name.

Why Long Product Names Get Cut: the Truncate Filter

Liquid’s truncate filter shortens a string to a set number of characters. By default it adds an ellipsis, and the three dots count toward the limit. So {{ product.title | truncate: 70 }} gives you 67 characters plus three dots.

Pass an empty string as the second argument and the ellipsis disappears. {{ product.title | truncate: 70, '' }} returns exactly the first 70 characters, cut wherever character 70 lands. Mid-word, often.

That’s the signature I saw. Titles of 69 or 70 characters before the brand, no dots, ending in fragments. Whoever added the filter probably wanted to stop long names wrapping onto three lines on a phone. It did that job. It also took the end of every long product name off the H1 and the title tag in one go.

Why would a theme do this at all? Layout, usually. A card in a collection grid has room for two lines, a long name breaks the design, so someone adds truncate. The damage starts when that same snippet, or a copy of it, ends up printing the title tag or the H1. There’s also truncatewords, which cuts at a word boundary. Kinder, but it still decides what to drop by position, and position is the whole problem when the useful word comes last.

If the only goal was tidy grid cards, CSS can do that visually with a line clamp while the full name stays in the HTML. Google reads the HTML. Shoppers see two neat lines. Nobody loses the shade.

How to find the filter in your theme

Duplicate your live theme first and work in the copy. Open Edit code and search for truncate. The usual hiding places are layout/theme.liquid, any snippet with seo, meta or head in its name, and the section or block that prints the product name. Some SEO apps write their own title tag too, so view source on a live product page and check there’s only one. Then put the text inside the title tag next to the product title in admin. Shorter, and ending mid-word? That’s your cut.

What I Found on One Indian Cosmetics Store

Here’s the audit, with every identifier stripped. It’s a D2C beauty brand on Shopify, and I started with the product URLs that carried the most impressions in Search Console, because that’s where a bad title costs the most clicks.

I won’t quote the real titles. They’d identify the brand. Here’s a made-up lip product in exactly the same shape, so you can see what the filter does. It’s illustrative.

Look at what’s left. Three different products, one identical title, and it ends in a fragment. Google’s title link docs have a name for repeated titles across related pages: micro-boilerplate. They also flag half-empty titles that are missing their main content. A truncated catalogue manages both at once.

The usual escape hatch doesn’t work either. When Google rewrites a title it often reaches for the H1, and on this store the H1 said the same cut thing. Product schema can’t rescue it: Google’s list of title link sources includes WebSite structured data, and Product markup isn’t on it.

It’s a template bug, not a copywriting problem. Nobody sat down and wrote a dozen bad titles. One line of Liquid wrote them all, and one line can fix them.

What Google Actually Displays

Google doesn’t set a character limit for titles. Its title link docs say there’s no limit on the title element, and the title link is truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width. Width is measured in pixels, so a capital W costs far more than a lowercase i. A 60-character title in capitals can be trimmed where a 65-character lowercase one fits.

Google doesn’t publish a pixel number. SEO tools model the desktop limit at roughly 580 to 600 pixels, and that’s a fair working guide, nothing more. Shopify’s own advice of 60 characters for the SEO field is the simpler rule, and it lines up.

Then there’s rewriting. When Google last explained its title system, it said it uses the title element around 87% of the time, up from around 80% before. The rest of the time it builds the title link from something else on or about the page: the main visual title, headings such as the H1, the og:title tag, prominent text, anchor text from links, or WebSite structured data.

So there are two kinds of truncation, and they look different. Google’s own trim adds visible dots at the end of the blue link. A theme cut shows a raw word fragment with no dots, in the search result when Google uses your title, and in the browser tab every time. View source tells you which one you’ve got in about ten seconds.

A Title Formula That Keeps the Part That Matters

The formula is short: short name, then the attribute that differs, then brand.

Short name. The product’s real name plus the category noun a shopper would type. Two to five words. Claim words like weightless, hydrating, long wear and smudge proof are real selling points. They belong in the meta description and the first lines of the description, where they can persuade someone who’s already looking.

The attribute. Shade, size, colour, scent, pack size. Whatever tells this page apart from its siblings. Keep it inside the first 50 or so characters so it’s visible even when Google trims on a phone.

Brand. Last, after a pipe. Dawn adds it automatically when the title doesn’t already contain it, so you rarely need to type it.

The second row matters more than it looks. If every shade lives on one URL as a variant, that URL represents all of them. Naming one shade in its title would misdescribe the page. Name the range instead and let the shade pages, if you have them, carry the shade.

What about the H1? It can be fuller than the title tag. A full, untruncated product name works fine as the H1 while the title tag runs the shorter formula. Google’s guidance is about the two describing the same thing. Word-for-word matching isn’t required. The one rule that matters is that neither gets cut.

The Liquid Patterns

Four edits cover the usual setups. Make them in a duplicate theme, preview, then view source before you publish.

1. Remove the cut from the H1

{%- comment -%} Before: hard cut at 70 characters, no ellipsis {%- endcomment -%}
<h1 class="product__title">{{ product.title | truncate: 70, '' }}</h1>

{%- comment -%} After: the full name, escaped, no cut {%- endcomment -%}
<h1 class="product__title">{{ product.title | escape }}</h1>

If the designer still wants short names on grid cards, leave the filter on the card snippet only. Cards aren’t headings, and the product page doesn’t depend on them.

2. Build the title tag from a short name and the attribute

This replaces the title block in layout/theme.liquid. It reads two product metafields you create under Settings, then Custom data, then Products: custom.short_name and custom.title_attribute, both single line text.

{%- liquid
  assign seo_title = page_title
  if request.page_type == 'product' and page_title == product.title
    assign short_name = product.metafields.custom.short_name.value | default: product.title
    assign attribute = product.metafields.custom.title_attribute.value
    if attribute == blank and product.selected_variant
      assign attribute = product.selected_variant.title
    endif
    assign seo_title = short_name | escape
    if attribute != blank
      assign attribute_safe = attribute | escape
      assign seo_title = seo_title | append: ': ' | append: attribute_safe
    endif
  endif
-%}
<title>
  {{ seo_title -}}
  {%- if current_tags %} | tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif -%}
  {%- if current_page != 1 %} | Page {{ current_page }}{% endif -%}
  {%- unless seo_title contains shop.name %} | {{ shop.name }}{% endunless -%}
</title>

How it behaves, line by line:

3. Pick the right variant object

This is the trap in most snippets you’ll find on forums. Shopify’s product object offers product.selected_or_first_available_variant, which returns the selected variant, or the first available one when nothing’s selected. On the canonical product URL nothing is selected. So a title built from it stamps one arbitrary shade onto the page that stands for all of them, and that shade changes whenever stock does.

product.selected_variant returns nil when there’s no variant parameter in the URL. That’s why the builder above uses it. Variant URLs typically canonicalise to the main product, so the title Google indexes is the clean one, and a shopper who shares a variant link still gets the shade in the browser tab. The variant’s own title is its option values joined by a slash, such as Dusty Rose or Olive / M, which reads fine after a colon.

When each shade is a separate product, as on the store I audited, there’s no variant to read. The shade goes into custom.title_attribute, or into the short name itself. Whether shades should be separate products at all is a bigger question, and I’ve written it up in Shopify variants vs separate products for SEO.

4. Give the meta description a better fallback

{%- liquid
  assign meta_description = page_description
  if request.page_type == 'product'
    assign summary = product.metafields.custom.seo_summary.value
    if summary != blank
      assign meta_description = summary
    endif
  endif
-%}
{%- if meta_description != blank -%}
  <meta name="description" content="{{ meta_description | strip_html | escape }}">
{%- endif -%}

One caution: in this version the summary metafield beats the admin Meta description field. Pick one place to write descriptions and stick to it, or flip the logic so the admin field wins.

Meta Descriptions That Are Just the Product Description

When the Meta description field on a product is empty, Shopify fills the search listing from the product description. That’s the default, and on most stores nobody changes it.

On the cosmetics store, every product’s meta description began with the words What It Is, because the description opened with that section label. So the snippet under each blue link started with a heading fragment, repeated across the catalogue, followed by claim copy written for someone already on the page.

Google’s snippet documentation is clear on the basics. It builds snippets mainly from page content and uses the meta description when that describes the page better. It wants descriptions unique per page. And for large database-driven sites, it says programmatically generated descriptions are appropriate and encouraged, as long as they’re human-readable and diverse. It even suggests product pages pull scattered facts together into one description. That’s the case for a template with a summary metafield.

A pattern that works for product pages:

Shopify’s CSV accepts up to 320 characters in the SEO description column. Google trims to the screen anyway, so put the useful part in the first 140 to 160 characters and treat anything after that as a bonus.

How to Audit Every Product Title in Bulk

You can’t eyeball this across a catalogue. The tell is a spike: lots of titles with identical length. Real product names vary. A filter makes them all the same. Three ways to find the spike, from easiest to most flexible.

Option 1: Screaming Frog, throttled

Crawl in list mode, using the URLs from your product sitemap. Before you start, open the Speed settings and drop to about 1 thread and 1 URL per second. Shopify rate limits crawlers. On the cosmetics store, a crawl at Screaming Frog’s default 5 threads got 429 Too Many Requests on 83 of the 86 HTML pages it reached. Those 429s show up as client errors and look like real breakage when the site is fine. Never report findings from a crawl that contains them. I’ve covered the settings in detail in how to crawl Shopify without 429 errors.

Then use the Page Titles tab filters: Duplicate, Over 60 characters, Over X pixels, and Same as H1. Export the tab, add a column that strips your brand suffix, and add another for its length. Sort by length, or paste the export into my free title tag truncation checker, which spots the spike and the mid-word cuts for you. If a block of rows all reads 70, or 69 and 70, and the Same as H1 filter catches the same URLs, you’ve confirmed a template cut.

Option 2: a sitemap script

No crawler licence? Shopify publishes a sitemap index at /sitemap.xml that lists the product sitemaps. This short Python script walks them at one request a second and prints the length of every title before your brand.

import html, re, time
from collections import Counter
import requests

STORE = "https://yourstore.com"
BRAND = "Your Store"          # the suffix your theme appends
HEADERS = {"User-Agent": "title-audit"}

def get(url):
    r = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS, timeout=30)
    time.sleep(1)             # one request a second
    if r.status_code == 429:  # rate limited: wait, then retry once
        time.sleep(30)
        r = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS, timeout=30)
    return r

def locs(xml):
    return [html.unescape(u) for u in re.findall(r"<loc>(.*?)</loc>", xml)]

maps = [u for u in locs(get(STORE + "/sitemap.xml").text) if "sitemap_products" in u]
urls = [u for m in maps for u in locs(get(m).text) if "/products/" in u]

lengths = Counter()
for u in urls:
    page = get(u).text
    m = re.search(r"<title>(.*?)</title>", page, re.S)
    title = " ".join(html.unescape(m.group(1)).split()) if m else ""
    core = title.split(BRAND)[0].rstrip(" |:\u2013")
    h = re.search(r"<h1[^>]*>(.*?)</h1>", page, re.S)
    h1 = " ".join(re.sub(r"<[^>]+>", "", h.group(1)).split()) if h else ""
    lengths[len(core)] += 1
    print(len(core), "SAME_AS_H1" if core == h1 else "", u)

print(lengths.most_common(5))

If the last line shows one length carrying a big share of your products, that’s your filter. Spot-check three products from different families in view-source to be sure.

Option 3: Search Console, for priority

Neither method tells you which cut titles cost money. Search Console does. In the Performance report, open the Pages tab, filter to URLs containing /products/ and sort by impressions. That’s how I picked the 12 I checked first. If you haven’t spent time in the less obvious reports, these seven Search Console reports are worth a look while you’re in there.

Bulk Editing Options on Shopify

Fixing the Liquid handles the template. The short names, attributes and descriptions still have to be written and loaded. Four routes, depending on catalogue size and who’s doing the work.

Sources for the table: Shopify’s bulk editing guide, its product CSV column reference, and the storefront SEO developer guide.

Should you shorten the product title itself or only the SEO title? Shortening the product title fixes the H1, grid cards and title tag in one move. It also changes the name in carts, emails and any feed that reads the title, so check your Google Merchant Center feed before you do it. Long names sometimes live there on purpose. Writing only the SEO title is safer for the feed but leaves the H1 long, which is fine as long as nothing cuts it.

Leave URL handles alone during all this. Shopify’s own product help warns against editing a handle too often, and a title change doesn’t need one.

The Fix, Step by Step

Here’s the order I’d run it in on any Shopify store, start to finish.

When the Title Isn’t the Whole Problem

Clean titles won’t fix architecture. On the cosmetics store, the 19 shade URLs of one product were each indexed as separate products with near-identical copy. Even with perfect titles they’d still compete with each other for the generic product term. That’s keyword cannibalisation, and the right owner for a generic head term is usually a collection page. I’ve written up how to build Shopify collection pages that rank.

Titles are also one item on a longer list of theme-level defaults. Duplicate collection paths and missing H1s on other templates sit in the same family, covered in Shopify’s built-in SEO traps.

And scale changes the stakes. When a store starts with 200,000+ URLs indexed, as the fashion store in my Shopify SEO case study did, nobody hand-writes titles. The template is the title. Get it wrong once and it’s wrong everywhere.

Questions I Get About Shopify Title Tags