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Every page has a main heading
seo.missing-h1
Why this matters
The h1 is the headline of the page. Without one, both visitors skimming and search engines parsing the page have nothing telling them what it is about.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
Minutes
Care needed
Low risk to change
How to fix it
Give every page exactly one h1 describing what the page is about.
On your platform
WordPress
The theme rather than a setting, and the usual cause is a page builder. Elementor, Divi and WPBakery all let a headline be styled text rather than a real heading, so it looks like a title and is not one — open the headline widget and set its HTML tag to H1. Where the theme prints the post title itself, a missing h1 means the template has been edited.
Shopify
In the theme's templates rather than in the admin. Product and collection templates normally print the name as the h1, so a missing one usually means a custom section, or a page built by an app, using styled text instead. Online Store → Themes → Edit code, then the section for that page.
Drupal
Usually the page or node template — `page.html.twig`, or the node template for that content type. A view used as a page is the other common cause: its title is not printed as an h1 unless the template says so.
Joomla
Often just a setting. Joomla prints the article title as a heading when Show Title is enabled on the article or the menu item, so check that before touching the template's index.php.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 10 points off your search score. It is a fact about your site rather than a measurement, so it reads the same on every scan until you change something.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 106. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther search checks
- Canonical tags point somewhere validA canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one for a page. When it points somewhere wrong — another domain, a dead page, or the wrong protocol — Google follows it anyway, and the page you wanted indexed can be dropped in favour of one that does not exist.
- Content has been updated recentlySome content is meant to sit still, and age alone is not a fault. But prices, opening hours and staff pages that have not been touched in over a year are usually wrong by now — and a visitor who acts on the wrong opening hours does not come back to check whether the rest was right.
- Descriptions are a sensible lengthLong descriptions get truncated mid-sentence; very short ones waste the space you are given.
- Each page has exactly one title tagA page can only have one title. When there are several, the browser and Google each pick one — and they do not always pick the same one, so what you see in the tab may not be what appears in search.
- Each page has one main headingSeveral top-level headings makes the structure of the page ambiguous. Worth checking rather than urgent — modern HTML permits it, and Google handles it, but it usually signals that headings are being chosen for their size.
- Every page has a search descriptionThe description is the grey summary under your link in Google. Without one, Google pulls an arbitrary sentence from the page, which often reads as nonsense out of context and gives people no reason to click.