Your website home page has no title: before and after

Every web page is meant to carry a short title in its code. It is the name on the browser tab, the name saved when someone bookmarks you, and the starting point for the blue headline Google shows in search results. When the home page has none, the tab shows the bare web address, and Google has to make up a headline from whatever else is on the page, often just the address or a stray heading. In a check of 43,077 small-business home pages, 1,274 (3%) had no title or an empty one.

Check your own site

Open your home page and look at the browser tab. If it shows your web address, or nothing at all, instead of your business name, the title is missing. To be sure, right-click the page, choose "View page source" (Ctrl+U, Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) and search (Ctrl+F) for <title. No match, or <title></title> with nothing between, is what this guide fixes.

What to write

Business name, what you do, and where: for example "Rivera Plumbing | Plumber in Columbus, OH". Keep it under about 60 characters so Google does not cut it off, and do not stuff it with a list of every town or service. Google decides the final headline itself and may still adjust it, but a clear title is what it starts from.

Set it in your website builder

• WordPress: Settings, General, set the Site Title, then Save Changes. If the tab still shows the bare address afterwards, the theme is missing one line: add_theme_support('title-tag'); in its functions.php (put it in a child theme so a theme update does not remove it). An SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math can also set the home page title directly.
• Wix: in the Editor open the Pages menu, the home page's "..." menu, SEO basics, set the Title tag, then Publish.
• Squarespace: Pages, the home page's gear icon, SEO, set the SEO title, then Save.
• Shopify: Online Store, Preferences, set the Homepage title, then Save.
• GoDaddy website builder: open the home page's settings (the gear by the page name), Search Engine Optimization, set the page title, then Publish.
• Weebly: Pages, Home, SEO Settings, set the Page Title, then Publish.
• Webflow: in the Designer, Pages panel, Home's gear, SEO Settings, set the Title Tag, then Publish.
• Hand-written HTML: add one line inside <head>:

  <title>Rivera Plumbing | Plumber in Columbus, OH</title>

Then clear the cache if the site or host caches pages, and check the browser tab again. Google picks up the new title the next time it visits the page, which can take days to a few weeks.

The browser tab and search result above are mock-ups for a fictional business built for this demo; real Google results vary. The 43,077-site figure comes from our own scan of small-business home pages in 2026: a site was counted when its home page had no <title> element or an empty one. Only the home page was checked. More before/after examples: all demos.