Appropriate page title
Silktide lists the title of each page so you can confirm it describes what the page contains. The title is shown in browser tabs and search results and is the first thing screen readers announce, so it needs to make sense on its own.
Why this matters
People rely on the page title to know where they are before they see or hear anything else. A announces it the moment a page loads, search engines display it as the headline of each result, and it is how users tell browser tabs and bookmarks apart. A title that does not describe the page misleads all of them at once.
How to fix it
Only a person can judge whether a title truly describes its page, so this check asks you to review titles rather than reporting confirmed problems.
- Review each reported title and ask: does it identify the subject of the page, and does it make sense out of context, such as in a list of search results?
- Rewrite titles that fail that test. Good titles are short, put the most
specific information first, and leave any repeated part such as the
organization name until last:
- "News - ACME Inc" rather than "ACME Inc - News"
- "Careers at ACME Inc"
- "ACME Inc" (appropriate for a homepage)
- titles that already describe their page well, so they are not raised again.
Starting every title with the same text, such as the organization name, makes titles harder to skim and slower to hear read aloud.
How Silktide tests this
- Read each page's
<title>element, ignoring any inside SVG graphics. - Present each non-empty title for you to review and approve or fix - Silktide cannot judge automatically whether a title summarizes the page.
Pages with no title, or an empty one, are reported separately by Missing title.