Hi guys. You currently allow 320 characters in the Description field under METADATA. Google did temporarily (in Dec 2018) allow descriptions up to this length, but (just 5 months later) they changed their mind and reverted to the previous shorter length of 150 to 170 characters (it’s based on pixels, not characters, hence the range of characters).
REQUEST: Your Description field should be shortened to allow only up to, say, 160 characters otherwise our copywriters are going to waste time writing longer descriptions that are going to get truncated in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). This will then cause unhappy clients or re-work (added cost to us) with our copywriters, which defeats our reason for using SlickPlan (i.e. efficiency in creating websites).
Here are some references regarding Google’s recent backflip on Description length:
- https://yoast.com/shorter-meta-descriptions/
- https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-it-shortened-search-results-snippets-after-expanding-them-last-december-298196
- https://www.quora.com/What-length-should-the-title-and-meta-description-be-in-2019
In that last Quora thread you will see: “New Google’s meta description length is up to 920 pixels, which might allow for up to 158 characters. On mobile devices, the max limit is about 680 pixels and 120 characters.”
It would be great if SlickPlan’s METADATA section had a toggle button to shorten the field’s character allowance based on Desktop vs Mobile. If you look at https://serpsim.com/ you’ll see their Desktop and Mobile buttons that allow the user to switch between each scenario.
I’d image making this change on the allowable number of characters would be a simple line-of-code type change. (Granted, the Desktop vs Mobile toggle button is a more complex task, so that can go on the roadmap wishlist).
Thanks!