H1 heading tags

Headings provide an outline for pages, making it easier to understand what they’re about. All site pages use heading tags to structure its content into multiple levels, from H1 to H6.

H1 headings classify the overall page content, and H2 to H6 headings let you organize content into topics and subtopics.

It’s often unclear how heading tags relate to your site’s appearance and SEO, so we have some answers to common questions below.

How are H1 headings generated?

Our themes follow Shopify’s recommended structure for generating headings.

  • The home page uses your store name as the H1 heading.

  • Product pages, collection pages, site pages, and blogs use the title entered in your Shopify admin.

Editing H1 heading of pages

To change the wording of a H1 heading, go to your Shopify admin. In the side panel, open the product, collection, or page. Edit the Title field, then click Save.

If you are looking to change the page title that appears in search listings, learn more below.

Editing H1 heading of home page

To change your store name, go to Shopify admin > Settings > General, then click to edit your store name under Store details.

Are keywords in the H1 vital for SEO?

Up until the early 2000s, heading tags were important ranking factors. This meant that keywords needed to be in headings to rank — but that’s no longer the case.

Today, site headings provide the context for understanding the content of your site. On their own, headings are not ranking factors for SEO.

Headings tell you what you can expect a page to be about. To improve your site’s ranking, it’s meeting those expectations that really matters. To learn more, check out our guide for SEO for Shopify themes

Common SEO warnings

When using SEO tools (like Google Console), you may see some warnings reated to H1 tags. Oftentimes, these warnings do not apply to Shopify online stores, which are structured differently than ordinary sites.

Multiple or duplicate H1 tags

An automated SEO test may have warned you about ‘multiple’ or ‘duplicate’ H1s.

The reason for this is that there’s one H1 tag used for desktop and one for mobile. Only one of these tags is actually rendered by the browser at any given time, depending on the device used by your visitor.

Google's own crawlers will not flag this as an issue or duplicate content though, so you can safely ignore these warnings in any automated testing. It's just a false positive on the test and shouldn't negatively affect your SEO performance.

Missing H1 tags

An SEO test may warn that you’re site is missing an H1 tag. Even when inspecting the code, it can look like there’s no content to the H1 tag.

However, this warning can be ignored. The theme automatically fills the heading content with your store name using an aria-label. SEO tools may mistakenly look for ‘hard coded’ text and not recognize the auto-generated label, which will cause a false warning.

Attaching the H1 tag to the logo and store name is Shopify’s recommended SEO structure that’s used by any premium theme.

It may appear that the H1 applies to the logo image, but in fact this piece of code contains the store name. The theme automatically fills the heading content with your store name using an aria-label.

Editing page title for SEO

H1 headings and page titles are not identical and can be edited separately, even though they often have the same content. While H1 headings appear on pages, the page title appears in search result listings, along with the meta description below.

You can edit the page title and meta description for each page, including the home page, in your Shopify admin. Go to your pages or posts, and click Edit website SEO. You can modify the the title, 'meta' description, and URL handle.

For the homepage, go to Online Store > Preferences > Title and meta description.

Can I change the heading tags?

In some sections, it's possible to change heading tags between H1 and H6. Click a section or title block to find the Heading tag setting.

Changing the heading tag will not alter the appearance of the heading text. The heading tag option is used only to change the page's code structure, which can help improve accessibility and SEO.

We recommend using this setting only when necessary. The structure of heading tags in our themes are intended keep your site accessible to everyone and properly indexed for search engines.

The order and placement of heading tags is important for people who use screen readers to navigate through the page.

Replacing default H1 headings

On some templates, it's possible to remove the default H1 heading. If you hide the default title, make sure to add a section with an H1 heading.

Hide default H1 headings

To remove the default h1 headings, go to your theme editor and open the template you want to edit.

Pages

Click the hide button on the Page section.

Collection page

Click the hide button on the Collection banner section.

Collection list page

Click to open the Collection list section and deselect the Show page title option.

Blog

Click to open the Blog posts section and deselect the Show blog title option.

Blog posts

Under the Blog post section, click the hide button on the Title block.

Add H1 heading to replace default

If you've hidden the default H1 heading, add a section to serve as the page header. You may want to use the Slideshow, Rich text, or Image with text section.

Click to open the heading or title block settings, then set the Heading tag option to H1.

Last updated