# How long a product headline should be > Character counts that survive a feed, a pin, and a search snippet — and what to move into the deck instead. - Canonical: https://hedpress.com/blog/how-long-a-product-headline-should-be - Markdown: https://hedpress.com/blog/how-long-a-product-headline-should-be.md - Site: Hed Press (https://hedpress.com) Published: 2026-11-03 ## How long should a product headline be? Short enough to keep the reader and the job inside about 50 to 70 characters, and long enough to say both. If a clause falls past that, it belongs in the deck. A headline that needs a tooltip is a sentence wearing a headline’s clothes. ## Count the visible line, not the one in your draft Writers judge a headline in a wide document. Readers meet it in a narrow column: a homepage row, a chat preview, a pin. The visible line is the one that has to carry the product and the person. Everything after the cut is a rumor. Fifty to seventy characters is a practical band for English product headlines. Under that, you can still fail by being vague. Over that, you can still be clear and then lose the clear part to an ellipsis. Fit the meaning into the band, then stop. ## Front-load the two nouns Product name and reader. Or reader and job. Those are the nouns a scanner uses to decide. A clause that starts with “The new way for modern teams to finally…” spends the visible characters on words that are not nouns. Read the first six words alone. If they do not contain a product or a person, move one of those forward. The rest of the headline can be a verb and an object. It should not be a windup. ## The deck is the second sentence you wanted A limit, a time of day, a tool it replaces — those details make a headline true and also make it long. Put them in the deck, directly under the line, where a reader who stopped on the headline can see them without a cut. Do not repeat the headline in the deck with extra adjectives. Add the fact that did not fit. “Support leads” in the headline, “before standup, from the help desk” in the deck. Together they are one thought. Apart, each is still useful. ## Numbers and names are short on purpose A number can earn its place when it is the job: “six lines,” “last 24 hours.” A number that is a rank — “#1,” “top 10” — usually is not the job. It is a claim the page then has to defend, and it spends characters. Proper names are the same. The product name stays. A customer’s name stays only if the story is about that customer. Otherwise it is a celebrity in a line that needed a role. ## What truncation does to a weak line “Fieldnote helps modern support organizations finally get clarity on overnight…” becomes “Fieldnote helps modern support…” in a tight column. The reader learned that a company helps organizations. They did not learn the job. The same cut on a tighter line — “Fieldnote — a morning brief for support leads” — still contains the product, the object, and the person. Truncation punishes windups and barely touches lines that started with the point. ## A check you can do without a tool Paste the headline into a note and set the width until it wraps. If the second line holds the only verb, rewrite. If the first line is a complete decision, you can stop, even if you had a clever ending. The headline bench on this site counts the characters and flags phrases that inflate the line without adding a person or a job. Use it before you fall in love with a draft that only works at full width. ### Is there a perfect character count? No. Fifty to seventy characters is the band that usually keeps a product and a reader visible. Clarity beats hitting a number. ### Should I write a short and a long version? Write one line that survives a cut, and a deck that holds the extra fact. Two headlines drift apart and one of them will be wrong. ### Do question headlines need to be shorter? They need room for the answer. If the question uses the whole visible line, the reader never sees the product. Prefer a statement. ### What about headlines on social posts? The same line should work. A social post can add a sentence after it. 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