Do character counts for meta title and meta description really matter?

Someone was asking if you need to use all the characters available for title and meta descriptions on a page.

No.

Next question please.

But seriously, you don't need to use all of the characters for your page titles or descriptions. In fact, there isn't even a limit anymore.

Technically, there never has been a limit or if there was it was something like 65,000 characters.

The limits we see in Shopify are just soft-limits the various search engines agreed on. Meta descriptions were capped at 160 characters while titles varied around 55-60 characters.

If your description went longer, then Google and the search engines would ignore it or use the first 160 characters. Nothing negative would happen if you used a bit more, you just wouldn't benefit from the extra description and it might be cut-off mid-sentence.

Titles never had a fixed limit, it always depended on how long the search results were. If you used a lot of narrow characters (l, I, etc) then you could squeeze in more than someone else (e.g. Moe's Many Pancake Membership would have suffered from the lack of space).

Then Google went and raised the description limit to 320 characters, then removed it, and then mobile browsing with narrow screens became the norm.

At the end of the day, the length of your title and description matter so little they aren't worth thinking about. Use what you need to describe the page and then move on.

Your time is better spent on adding more content to the page so it'll show up in more of the search results.

Fine-tuning all of your pages to fit perfectly into the character counts will end up being a waste of time. Search engines don't always use the title or description anyways.