WordPress Excerpt and Meta Description: Why 55 Words Doesn't Match 160 Characters

WordPress's built-in excerpt system has a default length defined in its own core code, inside wp-includes/formatting.php, filtered through the excerpt_length hook. That default is 55 words. Not 55 characters, not 160 characters — 55 words. It's a detail that's easy to skip past, but it's the direct cause of a mismatch that trips up a lot of WordPress sites relying on auto-generated meta descriptions.

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The Math Problem: 55 Words Is Roughly Double What Fits

A 55-word excerpt typically runs somewhere between 300 and 400 characters, depending on average word length. Google's search results, meanwhile, generally display somewhere around 155–160 characters of a description on desktop before truncating with an ellipsis, and closer to 120 on mobile. That means the WordPress default excerpt — the exact text that Yoast SEO and Rank Math both use as a fallback meta description when no custom one is set — typically runs more than double the length that will actually display before being cut off. Anyone who's ever seen their own site's search result end mid-sentence has likely run into this exact mismatch, often without realizing the WordPress core default is the root cause.

Yoast's History: 156, Then 320, Then Back to 156

Yoast SEO's own meta description length setting has a genuinely interesting history that illustrates how unstable "the" character limit for search snippets has been. For years the plugin capped meta descriptions at 156 characters. In December 2017, following Google's own brief experiment with longer search snippets, Yoast SEO 6.0 expanded that limit to 320 characters, with the plugin's release notes explicitly citing conversations with Google representatives about the change. That didn't last: Google reverted its snippet-length experiment within about six months, and Yoast SEO 7.6 reverted its own limit back down to 156 characters to match. Site owners who'd rewritten their meta descriptions to fill the temporary 320-character window were left with descriptions Google would no longer display in full.

The Yoast flip-flop is worth remembering any time a "definitive" character limit gets quoted with confidence. The limit didn't change because Yoast got it wrong the first time or the second time — it changed because Google's own search results page changed underneath everyone, twice, within about six months.

Rank Math Takes a Different, More Rigid Approach

Rank Math, the other major WordPress SEO plugin, currently enforces a hard 160-character cap directly in its meta description editor — the field simply won't accept more, shown against both a length bar and a pixel-width indicator. That's a stricter, more mechanical approach than Yoast's more permissive editor, and it sidesteps the kind of historical whiplash Yoast experienced, at the cost of flexibility if Google's display behavior shifts again in the future. Both plugins ultimately converge on similar practical guidance today — write to roughly 150–160 characters — but they enforce that guidance in noticeably different ways.

The Word-Based Trimming Problem for Non-Spaced Languages

WordPress's wp_trim_words() function — the one responsible for that 55-word default — works by counting words separated by whitespace. That assumption breaks down for languages like Chinese or Japanese, which don't use spaces between words the way English does. In practice, this can cause the trimming function to fail to find 55 "words" at all and return the entire post content instead of a properly shortened excerpt — a word-counting method quietly built around an assumption that doesn't hold for a meaningful share of the world's writing systems.

One Field, Three Different Downstream Jobs

The manual excerpt field in the WordPress editor, when filled in, overrides the auto-generated version everywhere it's used — and it's used in more places than just the post summary shown on archive pages. Both Yoast and Rank Math pull the %%excerpt%% variable as a fallback meta description whenever no separate SEO description is set, and the same excerpt typically feeds RSS feed output as well. A single piece of text ends up serving three different display contexts — archive preview, search snippet, RSS reader — each with its own effective length constraint, and there's no built-in mechanism that trims it differently for each destination. Setting a distinct SEO description separately from the excerpt, rather than relying on one field to do all three jobs, avoids the conflict entirely, and is generally treated as better practice than depending on excerpt auto-generation, a pattern also relevant to sites weighing WordPress against platforms like Medium, where the title, subtitle, and SEO fields are similarly separate from the story body.

What to Actually Do

The practical fix is straightforward once the underlying mismatch is clear: write a dedicated SEO meta description of roughly 150–160 characters rather than relying on the 55-word excerpt to double as one, and keep in mind that neither Yoast's nor Rank Math's number is a hard technical law — it's each plugin's current best estimate of Google's own display behavior, which has changed before and could change again. It's also worth remembering that Google rewrites a site's own meta description more often than it uses it verbatim, a pattern covered in more detail in the earlier post on why Google rewrites meta descriptions — so getting the character count exactly right matters less than most guides imply, even though staying within a sensible range still avoids the obvious mid-sentence cutoff.

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The honest summary: WordPress's own excerpt default is measured in words, not characters, and 55 words routinely produces double the length that actually fits in a search snippet — which is the real, root-cause explanation for a lot of oddly truncated WordPress meta descriptions. Yoast's own limit has moved once already, from 156 to 320 and back, tracking a Google experiment that didn't last. The safest approach is a dedicated SEO description written to roughly 150–160 characters, checked directly, rather than trusting an auto-generated excerpt to land in the right range by chance. For the exact current number on any specific search surface, the earlier meta description character limit post has the full breakdown.