Skipped heading levels: Crawl Audit check 59

Short answer: headings should step down one level at a time: H1, then H2, then H3. Jumping from H2 straight to H4 leaves a gap in the outline that screen reader users navigate by. Google says heading order doesn't matter for search, so this is an accessibility fix. Check 59 warns when a heading is more than one level below the heading before it.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Crawl Audit lists every H1 to H6 in page order, and counts each place where a heading is two or more levels deeper than the one before it.
• Pass: no skips.
• Warning: one or more, with the count.

Going back up is fine: an H4 followed by a new H2 isn't a skip. The W3C's headings tutorial agrees: "It is ok to skip ranks when closing subsections".

What the guidance says

• Google, SEO starter guide: "Having your headings in semantic order is fantastic for screen readers, but from Google Search perspective, it doesn't matter if you're using them out of order."
• MDN: "Do not skip heading levels: always start from <h1>, followed by <h2> and so on." Otherwise "the person navigating this way may be left wondering where the missing heading is."
• W3C, headings tutorial: "Skipping heading ranks can be confusing and should be avoided where possible".
• WCAG technique G141 advises "headings that are properly nested (e.g., h1 followed by h2, h2 followed by h2 or h3, h3 followed by h3 or h4, etc.)."

None of these call a skipped level a WCAG failure. It's advice, which is why this is a low-impact warning.

On devmarde.com

We found two skips on our own site on 3 October. Every blog post had an H2 for its sources, then H4s for the related posts beneath, and our blog index went from its H1 straight to H3 post titles. We fixed both the same day: the related posts now have an H2 label with H3 titles, and the index has an H2 above the post list.

How to fix it

• Choose the heading level by position in the outline, and the size with CSS. A small heading under an H2 is still an H3.
• Check shared parts too: sidebars, footers and "related posts" widgets often use H4 or H5 because the size looked right.
• To see your outline, list the headings with a browser extension or the full Crawl Audit report.

Sources

• Google Search Central, SEO starter guide (updated 10 December 2025), checked 3 October 2026.
• MDN, <h1> to <h6>: The HTML section heading elements, checked 3 October 2026.
• W3C WAI, Headings tutorial, and Technique G141 (updated 9 March 2026).