Why PrestaShop 8’s Native Meta Counter Is Useless for SEO

If you manage a reasonably serious PrestaShop 8 store, you’ve seen this number at some point: 128. It’s the counter that appears below the meta_title field in the V2 product form — the one that counts characters as if you had a generous amount of space left. The problem: that 128 is completely irrelevant for SEO. Here’s why, what number actually matters, and the silent trap this introduces in stores that don’t catch it.

The number shown and why it’s shown

PrestaShop 8’s native counter reads the maxlength property of the HTML input. That property is defined in the theme and fed by the product table schema in the database. For a product’s meta fields, the standard values are:

meta_title in the Product model: VARCHAR(128) → counter 128.
meta_description in the Product model: VARCHAR(512) → counter 512.

Those values were set in early versions of the PS schema to avoid truncating text on save. They are database limits, not writing targets or SEO targets. The distinction matters more than it seems.

The numbers that actually matter in 2026

Google shows a finite snippet per entry in search results. When it exceeds that snippet, it truncates with ellipsis. The practical rule that has held up for years, backed by continuous SERP measurement data:

Title: Google reserves approximately 600 pixels to display it. At typical font body and weight, that’s ~60 characters. Past that number, your title will most likely be truncated.
Description: ~160 characters on desktop, ~120 on mobile. If you go past 160, the mobile snippet gets cut before the call to action.

The difference between 60 and 128 is not trivial. If you write a title at 110 characters because ‘I haven’t exceeded the limit’ shown on screen, Google will display the first 60 and truncate. The part of your title you cared about most — the differentiator you put at the end — nobody sees.

The same applies to descriptions: if you trust the counter’s 512 and write a 280-character description, Google will show the first 160 and half your narrative falls outside the SERP.

The silent trap

What’s truly costly about this mismatch isn’t the obvious part (some product pages having truncated titles). It’s that no one on your team notices it. The in-house SEO and the person uploading products see the counter, check they haven’t exceeded it, sign off on the meta, and move on. The degradation is invisible until someone audits SERPs one by one.

Common symptoms in PS8 stores with this problem:

SERP titles that end in ‘…’ right before the long-tail keyword.
Product page CTR in Search Console below sector average.
Google-generated descriptions (the ones GoogleBot rewrites when yours isn’t convincing) instead of yours.
Inconsistency between the meta you see in the back office and what you see when you paste the URL into an external SEO tool.

How to measure whether it applies to you

Quick audit in 15 minutes:

Export the metas of your top 50 products by organic traffic (Search Console → Pages → sort by clicks).
Count characters for each meta_title and meta_description.
Mark in red anything over 60 (titles) or 160 (descriptions). Mark in yellow anything close to those numbers (50–60 / 140–160).
For the red ones, search each product by exact name in Google and look at the SERP. If the title is truncated, you’ve confirmed the problem.

If the result shows more than 20% of products with titles or descriptions outside target, the accumulated CTR loss over 6 months is significant.

What happens if you fix it and what happens if you don’t

Fixing it properly involves two things: (a) briefing your SEO/content team on the new targets, and (b) changing the visual feedback in the back office so the new limits are visible while writing. The team briefing doesn’t hold without the visual feedback — experience tells us that anyone, with the best intentions, will trust the number in front of them.

Not fixing it means every new product you add and every existing product you edit keeps entering the problem. If your cadence is 5 new products per month, that’s 60 products per year with suboptimized metas — on top of the 200 you already had. The debt grows silently.

The starting point for the fix

The key component is the visible counter. PrestaShop doesn’t let you change the input’s maxlength from the UI without touching the database (and you wouldn’t want to, because that is a real column limit). The solution is to hide the native counter and add a new one calibrated to SEO, without touching the model or the theme. That’s the job of a module or a JS snippet injected into the back office.

The next post in this series covers the technical implementation: how to detect meta fields in any PS8 form, how to inject the counter with color feedback (green/amber/red), and how to avoid duplicating the counter on the V2 product page that has its own field render.

If your PS8 store has this problem or your audit found something different from what’s described here, write to us at hola@zeyvro.com — posts get refined with real cases, not manuals.

Zeyvro Meta Counter is the module that solves exactly this: SEO character counter (60/160) with color-coding, without modifying the theme or the database. Free, MIT license.

View source code on GitHub ↗ · Download ZIP (latest version) ↗