The header (banner) landmark: Crawl Audit check 183

Short answer: the site-wide strip at the top of your pages, with your logo and usually the menu, should be a <header> element. Screen readers announce it as the "banner" landmark. Check 183 warns if the page has none.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a <header> element, or an element with role="banner".
• Warning: neither.

It accepts any header element. Only one placed directly in the page body counts as the banner landmark, so a page with headers only inside articles passes this check without having one.

What W3C says

• "The HTML header element defines a banner landmark when its context is the body element."
• A header inside an article, aside, main, nav or section is not a banner landmark. It just introduces that section.
• "Each page may have one banner landmark."

Using it well

• Put the logo, site name and main menu in one top-level header.
• Keep page-specific titles and intros inside <main>, not the header.

On devmarde.com

Our pages have one top-level <header> with the logo and menu. It passes.

Sources

• W3C ARIA Authoring Practices, Landmark regions, checked 6 October 2026.