Writing useful headings

Headings are an important part of your page structure. Headings help:

• users scan content and decide whether to read further
• screen readers navigate your page
• search engines index your content and decide whether to include it in results

When you are writing headings, you should:

• put the most important information at the start of the heading – ‘Applying for a home’, not ‘How to apply for a home’
• use clear, descriptive language
• use sentence-case – only capitalising the first letter and any proper nouns
• use code, not formatting, to mark headings
• put headings in a logical sequence
• avoid using questions as headings
• check if your headings work as a summary of the page’s contents

Choosing page titles #

Your page title should 

• be short and descriptive
• not duplicate other page titles on your site
• describe the purpose of a page
• make sense when read out of context, for example in a sitemap
• use the page title element and <h1> tag

Applying heading structure #

Headings must follow a logical structure. The headings on a webpage follow a nested order:

• use Heading 1 (<h1>) for the page title
• use Heading 2 (<h2> for subheadings
• use Heading 3 (<h3>) for any subheadings within H2 content 
• only use further heading tags (<h4>, <h5>, <h6>) if nesting content further

You can only skip headings if moving up the order – for example, you can move from <h4> to <h2> but you cannot move from <h2> to <h4>