The "60 character" rule is a proxy. Google truncates on rendered width, not character count - roughly 600 pixels on desktop and around 500 on mobile.
That matters because characters are not equal width. A title of 62 narrow characters can fit where 55 wide ones do not:
Free Title Tag Tips- narrow letters, lots of room left.WOMBAT MARKETING MANAGEMENT- same character count, far wider.
Uppercase, W, M and @ are wide. i, l, t and f are narrow. Titles in title case fit more than titles in caps.
The working rules
Stay under 60 characters as a default, and check the rendered width if the title is unusually wide or narrow.
Front-load the target phrase. Truncation happens at the end, so anything that must be read has to be at the start. It also matters for relevance - the earlier a phrase appears, the more weight it carries.
Brand at the end, separated. Primary Phrase - Qualifier | Brand. On brand-name searches Google often drops the site name anyway, since it already shows the domain.
Under about 20 characters is a wasted slot. "Home" and "Pricing" are titles that tell a searcher nothing and rank for nothing.
Why Google rewrites titles
Around a third of titles get rewritten in results. The common triggers:
Keyword stuffing. Time Tracking | Time Tracker | Track Time | Best Time Tracking gets replaced, usually with your H1.
Boilerplate repetition. Every page titled Acme - The Best Software. Google substitutes something more specific from the page.
Contradicting the H1. If the title says one thing and the visible heading says another, Google tends to trust the heading.
Missing or empty. It will construct one from the H1 or from anchor text pointing at the page.
The fix for a rewrite is never a longer title. It is a title that accurately describes what the page actually says.
Titles versus H1s
They serve different readers and do not have to match.
The title is for the search results page. It competes with nine other results and should lead with the phrase and a reason to click.
The H1 is for someone who already clicked. It can be shorter and more direct.
Title: Free Meta Tags Checker - Title, Description & Canonical
H1: Meta Tags Checker
They should agree on topic. They do not need to be identical, and forcing them to be usually makes one of them worse.
Every page, unique
Duplicate titles across a site are one of the clearest cannibalisation signals there is. Two pages titled Blog | Acme are two pages competing for nothing in particular.
Every indexable page needs a title that would make sense read on its own, out of context, in a list of ten results.
Preview your title at rendered width rather than counting characters, and check it on mobile too - the mobile limit is roughly 50 characters and is where most truncation actually happens.
Launch it where the numbers are checked
RankCert ranks products on domain control we verify ourselves. Listing is free and the link stays dofollow whether or not you display the badge.