Three fields, three different rules
The 160 character bio gets all the attention, but it is the easiest of the three. It is a plain length cap: write to it, stop at it, done. The display name is a 50 character cap and accepts almost anything, including emoji and non Latin scripts.
The handle is the one that causes trouble. Fifteen characters, and only letters, numbers and the underscore are permitted. No full stops, no hyphens, no accents, no emoji. People who have picked a handle with an accented letter in it spend a surprising amount of time working out why nothing saves.
Lead with the noun
X searches bio text when someone looks for accounts, which means the first job of a bio is to contain the word a person would actually type. "Structural engineer" is searchable. "Professional overthinker" is not, unless the thing you want to be found for is the joke.
The ordering that works is plain description, then the personal bit. You lose nothing by putting the noun first, and someone scanning a list of search results sees the useful half before the line is cut off.
Use the website field
There is a separate website slot on the profile that sits under the bio, and it does not spend any of your 160 characters. A surprising number of accounts paste their link into the bio instead, buying a shortened URL with about twenty characters of writing.
Put the link in the field, keep the words in the bio. If you genuinely need two links, the bio is the wrong place for the second one and a landing page is the right one.
Emoji are cheaper here than on TikTok, but not free
At 160 characters there is genuine room for a couple of emoji, which is not true of an 80 character field. The caution is the same one as everywhere: compound sequences cost more than they look. A flag is two joined characters, a skin tone variant is two, a family can be seven.
One or two simple emoji as punctuation reads fine. A row of six at the end of a bio reads as decoration applied after the thinking stopped. If you want to browse by mood rather than guess, our aesthetic emoji page is sorted that way.
Fancy fonts cost you search and accessibility
Unicode letter styles paste into the display name and the bio and look striking. Two things happen that nobody mentions. Search stops matching your text, because the characters are mathematical symbols rather than letters. And a screen reader announces them one by one as symbol names, which makes your profile unreadable to the people using one.
If you want the look anyway, the display name is the place to spend it, since the bio is doing the search work. Our fancy text generator produces every style X will render.
Lines worth retiring
"Views are my own" has no legal weight and appears on millions of profiles. "He/him. Dad. Runner. Opinions." is four nouns that could describe anyone in the building. "Building something new, stay tuned" tells a visitor nothing and ages badly within a month. All three are character budget spent on saying you exist, which the profile already established.