Pages Still Titled Untitled Document

What the tab says

A print shop's website was built by hand some years ago, page by page, in a web editing program. Open several pages in tabs and most of them say the same thing: Untitled Document.

For a visitor using a screen reader it is worse. As each page opens, the screen reader announces its title, and on these pages it says Untitled Document, again and again.

Nobody chose that title. It is what the editing program puts in every new page until someone changes it, and on these pages nobody did.

Where the title is used

The page title sits in the code at the top of each page, not on the page itself, so it is easy to miss. Yet it is used in many places:

• The browser tab, where visitors with several pages open tell them apart.
• Screen readers, which announce it first when a page loads.
• Bookmarks and favourites, which take the title as their name.
• The browser history, where visitors look for a page they saw yesterday.
• Search results, where it is usually the blue headline.
• Shared links, which often carry the title onto social networks.

In each of those places, Untitled Document tells the visitor nothing, and six tabs or bookmarks with the same name are no help at all.

Why it matters to screen reader users

A sighted visitor glances at the page and sees where they are. A screen reader user hears the title first, and it is their first confirmation that the link went where they expected.

Identical titles force them to listen further into each page to tell one from another. Across a dozen pages, that is slow and tiring.

The guidelines most accessibility work follows, WCAG 2.0, make a descriptive page title a basic, Level A requirement for exactly this reason.

Which words go first

Put the page's own subject first and the business name after it: Business cards, then the shop's name and town. Tabs, history and screen readers all start from the left.

Tabs are narrow, and with several open only the first few words show. If every title starts with the business name, every tab looks the same again.

Search results cut long titles too. Since Google enlarged its result headlines in March, fewer characters fit, so the words that describe the page belong at the front.

Writing a good title

Each title should be unique on the site and describe that page alone. Large format printing and the shop's name is a title; Products is not.

Keep it short enough to read at a glance, usually under 60 characters, and plain: the words a customer would use, not internal names or codes.

Match it to the page's main heading where you can. A visitor who hears the title and then the heading should recognise the same page.

Finding the pages that missed out

Search Google using the site: operator with your domain and the words untitled document. Every page Google has indexed under that title will appear.

In Webmaster Tools, the HTML Improvements report lists missing, duplicate and non-informative titles. Duplicates matter as much as defaults, since twenty pages called Home tell visitors just as little.

On a hand-built site, the editing program can usually search every file at once for the words Untitled Document, so each one can be replaced with a real title.

A worked example

An orienteering club's website was built by a volunteer in an editing program years ago, with a page for each event: the map, directions, start times and, afterwards, the results.

Almost every event page carried the default title. A member who relies on a screen reader pointed out that the results pages all announced themselves alike, so finding last month's meant listening through each one.

Members' bookmarks were all called Untitled Document, and in search results the club's events appeared under that headline too.

The current volunteer searched the site's files for the default text and wrote a title for each page, starting with the event, then the date, then the club's name.

A note in the club's website instructions now says to write the title before saving any new page, and the template for event pages comes with a title pattern ready to fill in.

Titles in content management systems

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal build each title from the page's name, often adding the site name. Check whether the theme or settings put the site name first, and swap them if so.

A system that builds titles automatically still depends on the page names. A page named Page 2 or New page gets a title to match.

Titles on new pages

The fix stays fixed only if new pages are titled when they are made. In a hand-built site, someone has to type the title every time.

A template for each kind of page, with the title pattern already in place, makes the right title the easy one.

When a page is copied from an old one to save time, the old title comes along too, so check the tab before publishing.

The counter-case

Page titles are not where a site's accessibility is mostly won or lost. Headings, link text, image descriptions and form labels affect far more of a visit.

And a page nobody bookmarks or finds by search, such as a form's thank-you page, gains less from a careful title.

But a title is still the first thing a screen reader says on every page, and fixing it is among the quickest accessibility repairs there is, so it is worth doing everywhere.

Giving every page a name

1. Open each page and read the tab.
2. Search Google for untitled document on your domain.
3. Check the HTML Improvements report in Webmaster Tools.
4. Write a unique title for every page.
5. Put the subject first and the business name after.
6. Match each title to the page's main heading.
7. Add a title pattern to every page template.

Step five decides whether the titles help. The business name is the same on every page, so leading with it brings the problem back in a new form: a row of tabs that all look alike.

Another small piece of code that tells a screen reader what something is, the label on a form checkbox, is the fix in a consent checkbox with no label attached.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.