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>