A missing H1 heading: Crawl Audit check 58

Short answer: a page with no H1 has no main heading in its code, even if a big line of text looks like one. Screen reader users jump between headings to find their way, and Google lists headings among the places it looks when writing a page's title link. Check 58 fails when there's no <h1> at all.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: at least one <h1> on the page.
• Fail: none.

How many H1s you have is check 57.

What Google and MDN say

• Among the sources Google uses for title links: "Main visual title shown on the page" and "Heading elements, such as <h1> elements".
• Google also suggests "putting the title text in the first visible <h1> element on the page".
• MDN: "A page should generally have a single <h1> element that describes the content of the page".

Why a page ends up with no H1

• The main heading is styled text (a <div> or <p> made big with CSS), not a heading element.
• The theme makes the page title an H2, or hides it.
• A home page that opens with an image or slider and no heading.

How to fix it

• Make the main visible title of the page an <h1>. It doesn't need to match the title tag word for word, but it should describe the same thing.
• If the design calls for a small heading, keep the H1 and change its style, not its level.
• WordPress: the Title block's heading level is set in your theme's template. If the theme shows the title as an H2 or hides it, change the level in the template, or add a Heading block set to H1.
• Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: set the page's main title to the largest heading level in the text editor, then check the result in view-source.
• Next.js: render the page's title as an <h1> in each page component.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Influencing your title links in search results (updated 10 December 2025), checked 3 October 2026.
• MDN, <h1> to <h6>: The HTML section heading elements, checked 3 October 2026.