SiteAud!tLint Support

Warning On-Page SEO

Missing H1

Severity
Warning
Impact
Medium
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
h1_missing

Why it matters

The H1 tells users and search engines what the page is about.

How to fix it

Add one H1 that states the page's main topic.

What this means

The page has no <h1> heading in its HTML.

Why it matters

The H1 is the page's main visible heading. It tells visitors they have landed in the right place, it is the top of the page outline that screen reader users navigate by, and it is one of the signals search engines use to understand the topic. Google also uses it when it rewrites a page's title link.

A missing H1 does not cause a penalty, but it weakens all three.

Common causes

  • The heading is styled text, not a heading: a <div> or <p> with large bold styling.
  • The logo is wrapped in an H1 on the home page only, and other templates have none.
  • A page builder where the hero block uses an H2 or no heading tag.
  • Headings added by JavaScript, invisible to a crawl without rendering. See JavaScript rendering.
  • Product or category templates where the name is printed in a non-heading element.

How to fix it

  1. Make the page's main heading an <h1>: the article title, the product name, the category name.
  2. Keep one H1 per page, describing that page. See Multiple H1 headings.
  3. Fix it in the template, so every page of that type gets one.
  4. Keep the H1 close to the title tag in meaning, without needing to be identical.

Verify the fix

Recrawl. The URL details list the H1 text found for each page. Template fixes clear every page of that type at once.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the On-Page SEO score 3 points, plus up to 12 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. Weakens rankings, crawling or measurement. Fix after critical issues.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Missing H1. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (medium) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code h1_missing. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.