Your website’s title is a vital piece of branding. Here’s how to quickly and easily set or change your site title in WordPress.
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Understanding the site title
There are a lot of different titles within WordPress, so let’s start by ensuring we’re talking about the same thing. Your site title is the name of your entire website and is likely to be your brand name. It’s probably closely related to your domain name too. For example, my brand name is K. M. Wade, my domain name is kmwade and my website title is K. M. Wade. Your site title may be displayed in the top bar of your site, on most, if not all, the pages of your site. Or you might choose to show your brand’s logo in place of your site title, as I have done. Regardless of whether you display your site title to visitors, it will be listed in your website code for search bots to see.
Your site title is distinct from:
- A page title — This is the name of an individual page on your site and is often called the h1 title or h1 heading because
<h1></h1>tags are used to specify a page title. - An SEO title — This is the title for a page that you want search engines to show in their search listings. It’s often called the title tag because you can tell search engines what you want them to write in their search listing titles by putting the text inside
<title>/<title>tags. The SEO title is often the page title, or a close variation of it, plus your brand name. - Your site’s tagline — This is a slogan that can be displayed under your site title.
The display of WordPress site titles is often attached to the WordPress theme in use, so if you’re unhappy with your title’s look or location, you may also want to consider changing your theme. You’ll want to have a WordPress theme, title, and tagline that fit your overall brand and feel cohesive. So if you’re changing one of these aspects, you may benefit from reviewing the full trio.
Editing your site title
Regardless of the way your site is set up or the theme you’ve chosen, there are two ways you can change your website’s title in WordPress. One is quick and easy. The second takes slightly longer but allows you to visualise the site title and how it’s displayed.
Editing your WordPress site title the basic way
If you just want to set or change your site title and don’t care how it’s displayed, this is the simplest way to do it:
- Go to ‘Settings’ in your WordPress dashboard then head to ‘General’
- You can edit your site title (and your tagline) right at the top of that page
- Hit ‘save’ and that’s it!
Editing your WordPress site title the visual way
If you want to display your site title on your pages and you want to make sure it looks good, choose this method instead:
- From your WordPress dashboard, select ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Customise’
- Then click on ‘Site identity’ to edit your website’s title and preview how it will look to a visitor
- If you want to change how and where your site title is displayed many themes offer several options — each theme locates those settings in different places, so you’ll need to explore a little or check your chosen theme’s documentation
- Be sure to press ‘Publish’ when you’re done to save and apply the change
Edit your site title with caution
As you can see, it’s not difficult to edit your site title once you know where the setting are. However, editing your site title isn’t something to take lightly. Changing your site’s title too much could cause confusion and cost you some credibility. If you’ve got an established business, I would only ever recommend changing your site title as part of a broader, well-considered branding strategy.