🔤 Character Counter

Track character count in real-time. Set a custom limit for tweets, bios, SEO meta tags, SMS messages, and more.

Character Counter

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Character Counter: Guide to Character Limits Across Platforms

Every digital platform has its own character constraints, and staying within them is essential for effective communication. The UltraTools Character Counter counts not just total characters but also characters without spaces and word count, while giving you a visual progress bar toward any custom limit you set.

Character Limits by Platform

Platform / Use Case Character Limit Notes
Twitter / X Post 280 URLs count as 23 chars regardless of length
Twitter / X Bio 160 Profile biography field
SMS Message 160 Single SMS; longer messages may split and cost more
Google Meta Description 155–160 Longer text is truncated in SERPs
Google Page Title Tag 50–60 Recommendations vary; Google shows ~600px width
Instagram Caption 2,200 Only 125 chars shown before "more"
Instagram Bio 150 Profile biography
LinkedIn Post 3,000 See more after 210 chars on feed
LinkedIn Headline 220 Professional summary line
Facebook Post 63,206 Effectively unlimited for most content
YouTube Video Title 100 ~70 chars shown in most search results
YouTube Description 5,000 First 157 chars shown in search

Why Character Count Matters for SEO

Meta descriptions and title tags have specific length constraints that directly impact how your pages appear in search results. A title tag that's too long gets truncated mid-word, which looks unprofessional and may reduce click-through rates. A meta description that's too short may cause Google to auto-generate one from your page content, which may not be optimized for your target keywords.

The optimal meta description length is 150–160 characters — long enough to be descriptive and include a call to action, short enough to display fully on both desktop and mobile search results.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes — in most contexts, spaces count as characters. Our "Characters" count includes spaces, while "No Spaces" gives you the count with all whitespace removed. This distinction matters for SMS messages (spaces count toward the 160 limit) and platform bio fields. The "characters without spaces" count is useful for counting actual typed characters for academic or linguistic purposes.
Emojis are counted as characters, but their count varies by implementation. Most modern emojis are encoded as multiple characters (2 Unicode code points for many common emojis). Our tool uses JavaScript's string.length property, which counts UTF-16 code units. Many platforms (Twitter, Instagram) use their own specialized counting that may differ slightly from our count for complex emoji sequences or multi-codepoint characters.
Twitter automatically shortens any URL to their t.co format, which always results in a 23-character string regardless of the original URL length. This means a short URL like "a.com" and a long URL like "https://very-long-domain-name.com/path/to/page" both count as exactly 23 characters in a tweet's character count. Our tool counts characters as-entered and doesn't apply platform-specific URL transformations.