For years, I've been told the same thing: Make your passwords longer. Add more characters, throw in symbols, mix uppercase and lowercase letters and you'll be safer online. 

But as password attacks get more sophisticated and tools like password managers become much more mainstream, longer passwords aren't always the best solution for privacy.

Length does matter (ha), but how you create and manage a password often matters just as much, if not more.

A long password that's predictable or reused across accounts can still be cracked, leaked or exploited. Meanwhile, a shorter password generated and stored properly might offer stronger protection.

Here's how password length actually works, where it helps, where it doesn't and what security experts recommend instead.

Why longer passwords are generally safer

Password strength is largely about entropy, which is a measure of how hard a password is to guess. The more characters a password has, especially when those characters are random, the more combinations an attacker has to try.

A 16-character password made of random letters, numbers and symbols (v9$QmR!2Zp#L8w@D) can take centuries to brute force with today's computing power. By comparison, an eight-character password (S3cur3!9), even a complex one, may only take hours or days if attackers have access to modern cracking tools.

That's why organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that sets cybersecurity guidelines used by the government and tech companies, recommend long passwords or passphrases instead of short, complex ones.

When long passwords don't help

Length alone doesn't save you if the password is predictable. A long password like PasswordPassword123! is far easier to crack than a shorter but fully random one.

Reusing long passwords across multiple accounts is another common problem. If one site suffers a data breach, attackers often try the same credentials elsewhere, a tactic known as credential stuffing. In that case, even a very long and complicated password offers very little protection.

Phishing attacks also bypass password length entirely. If you're tricked into typing your credentials into a fake login page, attackers don't need to crack anything at all; you give it to them on a silver platter.

Don't miss: Phishing Emails Aren't as Obvious Anymore. Here's How to Spot Them

Passphrases: Easier to remember, harder to guess

One popular alternative to traditional passwords is a passphrase, a string of unrelated words like river-battery-moon-carpet. Because passphrases are long and don't rely on predictable substitutions, they're significantly harder to brute force than short, complex passwords and easier for us to remember.

Passphrases work especially well for things you have to remember, like the master password for a password manager or a device login.

Password managers are still the gold standard

That said, security experts including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency generally agree that randomly generated passwords stored in a password manager are still the gold standard. They combine length, randomness and uniqueness, without forcing you to rely on memory (or a sticky note in your desk drawer).

The tradeoff is that you're trusting one tool to guard many logins, which makes securing your master password, enabling two-factor authentication and keeping recovery options up-to-date especially important.

So what should you actually do?

Long passwords are better, but only when they're unique, random and well-managed. The safest setup for most people looks like this:

• Use a password manager to generate and store long, unique passwords. Create a strong, memorable master password or passphrase.
• Enable two-factor authentication wherever possible.
• Avoid reusing passwords, no matter how long they are.
• Change passwords that have been exposed in a data breach, even if they were long.
• Be wary of phishing emails and fake login pages, which bypass password strength entirely.
• Use passkeys when available, which replace passwords with biometric or device-based sign-ins that can't be phished or brute-forced

Like most cybersecurity concerns, password security isn't about one perfect rule. It's about layering protections so that when one fails, the others still hold.