Fill in the empty part of the homepage title on WordPress
Why it matters
The title starts or ends with a separator such as a dash or a bar, which means the page name or the site name that belongs next to it is empty. Search results and browser tabs show the stray dash, and the headline of the result is weaker than it needs to be.
The fix
- The usual cause is an empty Site Title under Settings, General, or an empty tagline or homepage title field in an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO or SEOPress). Fill in the field that is empty, or edit the title template there to remove the separator.
- Reload the homepage and read the title in a private window, because caching plugins keep the old one.
Related
- Reported by the SEO basics check
- Add a title to the homepage
- Add a meta description to the homepage
- Add a canonical link to the homepage
- Fix the canonical link on the homepage
- Point the canonical link at your own domain
- Add Open Graph tags for link previews
- Complete the Open Graph tags
- Add a viewport meta tag
- Make the viewport follow the device width
- Replace the default WordPress tagline in the title
- Change the canonical link to https
- Check that the canonical link names the right host
Scan your domain to see whether this applies to you.