Website Headings: What Google and Customers Need

Most of the heading warnings a free SEO checker throws at you are not worth a morning of your time. Multiple H1 tags, skipped levels, too few headings: Google's own documentation says it does not rank pages on any of those. The heading fault that actually costs you enquiries is one most checkers cannot see. Headings that say nothing.

I run operations, so I read a lot of audit reports. A heading report is designed to look like a security report, with red and amber flags and a score out of 100. It is not one. A security finding means something can be broken into, while a heading warning usually means a piece of software counted tags and compared the total to a rule somebody wrote years ago.

I fell for it once myself. After a migration I spent most of a morning clearing heading warnings on a customer's site, then realised the checker had been counting widget titles in the footer and sidebar. The page customers actually read was fine. Since then I read the page first and the report second.

What Google Has Said About Headings

Google's SEO Starter Guide is unusually blunt on this ^[1]. It says having headings in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers, but that for Google Search it does not matter if you use them out of order. It also says there is no magical, ideal amount of headings a page should have, with one sensible rider: if you think it is too much, it probably is.

The multiple H1 question has an equally settled answer. Google's John Mueller said in a 2019 Google Webmasters video that several H1s on one page is a common pattern on the web and that Google's systems cope with it. One H1, five H1s, none. Not a ranking decision.

It is the same pattern as the 300-word rule that has owners padding their pages. A plugin turns a habit into a traffic light, and before long the traffic light feels like a Google requirement. It never was.

The one job Google gives your top heading

Headings are not ignored, though. Google's guidance on title links lists heading elements such as H1 among the sources it may use when it writes the clickable blue title for your page in search results, alongside your title tag and the main visual title on the page ^[2]. It suggests putting your main title in the first visible H1.

So what does that mean for you? If the biggest heading on your services page says Welcome, Google has one less good clue when it writes the line searchers decide to click. The fix is not to count your H1s. Make the top one describe the page instead.

The Two Warnings Nearly Everyone Gets

If your report is full of heading flags, you have plenty of company. WebAIM's 2026 analysis of the top million home pages, crawled in February 2026, found more than one H1 on a little under one in five of them (18.1%, up from 16.3% a year earlier) and skipped heading levels on roughly four in ten (41.8%) ^[3]. The average home page carried around 30 headings. Plenty of those sites rank perfectly well, which tells you heading markup was never the thing ranking them.

Multiple H1s

This is usually a theme habit. The site name or logo gets wrapped in an H1 on every page, then the page title gets another one. Google copes. A screen reader user hears two top-level headings and has to work out which one is the page. Untidy, not dangerous. If your theme has a setting for it, change it. Where the only fix is a new theme, leave it alone.

Skipped levels

An H2 followed directly by an H4, usually because the H4 happened to be the right size. Here the checker is half right, for the wrong reason. Google does not care. People using screen readers do.

WebAIM's 2026 Screen Reader User Survey, with 1,780 responses gathered in July and August, found that around two in three respondents go straight to the headings when they land on a long page (67.8%, down slightly from 71.6% in 2024), and close to nine in ten find heading levels useful ^[4]. Survey samples like this lean towards experienced users, so treat the exact figures loosely. The direction is not in doubt.

For that reader, a jump from H2 to H4 sounds like a section has gone missing. They go looking for something that is not there, and some of them give up on the page. Fix skipped levels for people rather than rankings, and you will find the fix takes minutes.

Who Actually Reads Your Headings

Sighted visitors use headings in much the same way, just faster. Nielsen Norman Group's eyetracking research describes a layer-cake pattern: eyes fixate mostly on headings and subheadings, dipping into body text only when a heading matches what the reader wants ^[5]. It works under two conditions. The headings have to stand out visually, and they have to describe accurately what sits underneath. That instinct is the same one behind the three-second test most small business home pages fail: visitors decide fast, and headings are what they decide on.

Consider a typical case. A mobile welder in Wicklow repairs horsebox ramps, trailers and farm gates, all from one services page. The top heading says Welcome. Underneath sit three bold paragraphs that look like headings but are not, then a large heading reading Get In Touch Today. A horse owner with a cracked ramp and a show at the weekend searches on their phone in the yard, lands on that page, scrolls past a wall of text that never says horsebox where the eye stops, and rings the next result instead.

The SEO checker gave that page a green light. It graded the tags. The customer graded the words. There is no warning in any report for a phone call that never happened, which is exactly why this fault survives for years.

What a working heading sounds like

Headings that do the job read like the questions customers arrive with, in their words, with the useful words first:

Horsebox and trailer ramp repairs
Farm gates, made and repaired
Areas we cover and call-out times
Prices and call-out charges
How to book a repair

Read those five on their own and you know what the business does, where it works, roughly what it costs and how to get the job booked. That is the whole test.

Visitors scan headings first and read the body only where a heading matches what they need.

Fake Headings and Shouting Headings

Two structural faults matter far more than how many H1s you have, and checkers explain both badly.

Fake headings are bold or enlarged paragraphs styled to look like headings. To a sighted visitor on a laptop they look fine. To a screen reader user jumping between headings they do not exist, so the section they introduce is effectively hidden. They also vanish from the editor's outline, which makes your own structure harder to verify.

Shouting headings are the opposite fault: a heading block used for a slogan or a phone number because it makes the text big. Call Now. Best Prices Guaranteed. Someone moving through the page by headings hears the slogan where a section name should be, and the real structure gets buried under marketing.

One rule fixes both. Heading blocks are for section titles, and size is a styling decision. In WordPress, the Heading block lets you choose any level from H1 to H6 and separately adjust font size through its Typography settings ^[6], so you never need the wrong level just to get the right look.

What this cannot fix for you

An honest limitation. Many themes style each heading level differently, so correcting a wrongly chosen H4 to the H3 it should be can make it noticeably bigger. That is often why the wrong level was picked in the first place. Change the level, then bring the size back down in Typography.

Headings your theme adds in the header, sidebar and footer are a separate matter. They live in templates, not in the page, so the block editor will not show or change them. A theme-level change affects every page at once, and it deserves more care than a page edit.

How to Audit Your Headings in Fifteen Minutes

This works on any WordPress site and needs no plugin.

Open the outline. In the block editor, open Document Overview and choose the Outline tab, which lists every heading on the page in order ^[6].
Read the headings alone. Ignore the body text and read only the outline, as a stranger on a phone would, then ask whether it tells them what you do, where and how to book.
Rewrite the vague ones. Replace Welcome, Our Services and Get In Touch with what is actually in each section, putting the most useful words first.
Convert and demote. Turn bold lines that introduce a section into proper heading blocks, and turn slogans sitting in heading blocks back into paragraphs or buttons.
Verify, then deploy. Preview the page on your phone, and for anything that touches the theme, make the change in a staging environment and push to production only once it looks right.

Do five pages a week and a typical small business site is finished within a month. Most owners find the rewrite in step three does more for enquiries than anything the checker suggested.

The Outline tab shows a page's headings on their own, which is the quickest way to judge them.

What a Sensible Setup Gives You

Strip away the scores and the requirements are short. Real heading blocks rather than styled text. Full access to edit every heading yourself, without paying someone €75 to €150 an hour to change a few words. A safe place to try theme-level changes before customers see them. And a fast stack underneath, so the page with the good headings actually loads on a phone in a yard.

Without that safe place, a theme tweak to tidy one footer heading goes straight to production and changes every page at the same moment, while customers are on them. With it, you break a copy instead.

Web60 meets that standard by giving you full WordPress, the platform W3Techs puts behind roughly four in ten websites, rather than a stripped-down editor. You describe your business and get a fully designed WordPress site in under a minute, then edit every heading in the same block editor and Outline tab described above. One-click staging handles theme-level changes. Nightly backups with one-click restore mean a heading rewrite that goes wrong is a rollback, not a rebuild. The whole thing runs on an Nginx, Redis and FastCGI caching stack for €60 a year, with hosting and SSL included.

AI gives you a strong first draft. It does not know that your customers say horsebox rather than equine trailer. You do, and that knowledge is precisely why building your own site beats briefing a stranger to build it for you. Read the outline and rewrite it in your customers' words.

A fair concession. If all you want is a one-page portfolio you will never touch again, a locked-template builder that will not let you change heading levels at all is arguably the safer choice, because you cannot break what you cannot edit. For a business page that has to win enquiries, that same lock is the problem. And if you employ ten or more people and sell to consumers online, the European Accessibility Act may apply to you, so a proper accessibility audit is worth paying for. A fifteen-minute outline review is a good start, not a compliance certificate.

The Fifteen Minutes That Matter

Heading warnings are easy to clear and mostly irrelevant to Google. Headings that describe your services in your customers' words take more thought and are worth far more. Work on them in that order of importance, not in the order the report lists them.

Open one page this week and read its outline on its own. If those few lines tell a stranger what you do and how to book, that page is in good shape, and you can move on to the next one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it bad for SEO to have more than one H1 tag?

No. Google has said its systems handle several H1s on one page, and its SEO Starter Guide says there is no ideal number of headings. Multiple H1s usually come from a theme that wraps the site name in an H1 on every page. It is untidy for screen reader users, so fix it if it takes five minutes, but do not change theme over it.

Does heading order affect Google rankings?

Google's SEO Starter Guide says it does not matter for Search if headings are used out of order. Order does matter to people who use screen readers, who often jump from heading to heading to find their way around a page. Keep levels in sequence for them, with H2 for main sections and H3 for points inside a section.

How many headings should a web page have?

There is no target. Google says there is no magical, ideal amount, and adds that if you think it is too much, it probably is. A practical guide is one heading for each thing a customer might be looking for on that page, such as a service, the area you cover, your prices and how to book.

Should my H1 match my page title tag?

They do not have to be identical, but they should be about the same thing. Google may use your H1 or other prominent headings when it writes the clickable title for your page in search results, so a top heading that says Welcome gives it nothing useful. Describe the page in both, in plain words.

How do I see all the headings on a WordPress page?

In the WordPress block editor, open the Document Overview panel and select the Outline tab. It lists every heading block on the page in order, so you can read the structure on its own and spot skipped levels, vague wording and missing sections before you publish.

Why does my SEO plugin still show a heading warning after I fixed the page?

Many checkers read the whole page, including headings your theme adds in the header, sidebar and footer. Those live in theme templates rather than the page itself, so they will not appear in the Outline tab. If the warning comes from a template, decide whether it matters to customers before changing anything, and make any theme-level change in a staging environment first.