Skip to content

Missing H1

mediumseo-h1-missingreviewed

An H1 names what a page is about, for readers, screen readers and search engines alike. Why a page with none is harder to place, and how to fix it.

What it is

The <h1> is the top-level heading of a document: the one sentence that says what this page is. This check counts <h1> elements in the served HTML and fails when there are none.

It is a separate question from whether the page looks like it has a heading. A styled <div> at 48 pixels is a heading to a sighted reader and nothing at all to anything parsing the document.

Why it matters

A screen reader user navigating by heading gets no entry point into a page with no H1 — the outline they rely on to skim starts empty.

For a search engine it removes the clearest author-declared statement of the page's topic. The engine will infer one from the rest of the content, and inference is exactly the thing you do not want deciding what your page is about.

How to fix it

with a reference doc
html
<h1>Main page heading</h1>

Reference documentation

Related checks

4
lowMultiple H1 tagsThis check counts <h1> elements and flags a page carrying more than one. It runs only when the page has at least one, so it is a separate finding from a missing H1.lowHeading hierarchyHeading hierarchy is whether a page's <h1> through <h6> tags step down one level at a time — an <h2> can be followed by another <h2> or an <h3>, but not by an <h4> with no <h3> in between. This check reads the sequence of heading tags in the order they appear in the HTML.highMissing title tagThe <title> tag in a page's <head> names the page for browsers, search results and social shares. It's one of the few pieces of a page search engines still treat as an explicit, author-declared signal rather than something inferred from content.mediumThe lang attribute on <html>The lang attribute on the <html> element declares the document's primary language, as a BCP 47 tag: lang="en", lang="en-GB", lang="pt-BR". This check reads the served HTML and fails when the attribute is missing or empty.

This is one of the 75 checks the scanner runs. See what we check for the full list, every severity weight, and how the score is computed from them.

See whether your own site passes missing h1.

One page, all 75 checks, free. No account, no card.

Check this on my site