Heading Analyzer

What the heading outline is, and who reads it

Your headings are not decoration with a font size attached. Taken in order, they are a nested table of contents that four different consumers read for four different reasons.

Only the last of those sees your styling. The other three see the tag, which is why a line that looks like a heading and is marked up as bold text is invisible to all of them. The tag is the structure, and the CSS is a separate question.

The six ways an outline breaks

Almost every heading defect is one of six things, and they are not equally serious. The first three are worth fixing today, and the last three are worth understanding first.

How many H1s a page should have

This is the most repeated piece of heading advice and the least accurate. The claim that a second H1 dilutes or penalises a page has never been true of HTML5, and Google has said so directly more than once.

• The specification permits it. HTML5 sectioning content gives every article and section its own heading rank, so several H1s on one document is legal markup rather than a mistake.
• Google tolerates it. John Mueller has confirmed that pages with multiple H1s, and pages with none, are both handled without penalty.
• Screen readers cope. A second H1 does not break heading navigation. It just means the outline has two roots instead of one.
• Clarity is the real argument. The H1 answers what this page is about, and a page giving two answers has usually not decided.

So the count on its own is not the finding. What matters is where the extra H1 came from, which is why this tool tags each one by zone. A logo wrapped in an H1 by the theme, plus an H1 on the article, is the common case and it is a template change.

Your template has headings too, and they are in the outline

A crawler and a screen reader both walk the document from top to bottom. That walk includes the site navigation, the header, the sidebar and the footer, so the outline you ship is never only the outline you wrote.

This is why heading checkers disagree with each other and with what you see in the editor. A tool counting only the article reports a clean hierarchy; a tool counting the document reports a skip that the article did not cause.

• The whole document is checked, because that is what gets walked, so a real skip is never hidden by scoping the check to the body copy.
• Every heading is tagged by zone: content, nav, header, footer or aside, using the same content boundary as the page word counter.
• A header inside your article stays content. Wrapping a post title in article > header is correct markup, so it is not reported as template furniture.

The practical value is knowing which file to open. A skip between a footer H3 and a nav H2 is one theme edit that fixes every page on the site at once, which is a better day than editing two hundred posts.

How to analyze the headings on a page

Seven steps, in the order that fixes the most pages for the least work. The first one is the one people skip.

1. 01

   Analyze the page a reader actually lands on

   Headings are template-driven, so one page is rarely representative. Run the template you publish most: the article layout, the product layout, the category layout. A defect in any of those is a defect on every page using it.

2. 02

   Read the H1 count first

   Zero is the one unambiguous failure, because nothing on the page names its own subject. More than one is valid HTML and worth understanding rather than fixing on sight.

3. 03

   Fix the skipped levels next

   A jump from H2 to H4 leaves a section hanging off nothing. Change the tag on the offending heading rather than inserting a heading nobody needed, which is the fix that adds noise to a page to satisfy a checker.

4. 04

   Check which headings belong to your template

   The outline is tagged by zone, so headings from the nav, header, footer and sidebar are visible as such. A skip caused by a footer H3 is a theme change, not an edit to the article.

5. 05

   Clear the empty headings

   A heading tag with no text and no image alt inside it announces nothing to a screen reader and gives a crawler an empty label. These are almost always rendered unconditionally by a template.

6. 06

   Rename the repeated labels

   Several sections called Overview or Features make the outline useless for navigating. The heading is what someone reads to decide whether to keep scrolling, so it needs to say what its section holds.

7. 07

   Promote the bold lines that are really headings

   A short bold paragraph with no full stop is a heading that was styled rather than marked up. It reads as a heading on screen and is missing from every list of headings a reader can jump between.

Structure is one of three things worth checking on the same page. The word counter shows whether there is enough copy to need sections, the readability checker shows whether the sentences inside them can be read, and the meta tag checker covers the tags that get someone to the page in the first place.

What this analyzer checks

Frequently asked questions