5 Reasons Why Your WordPress Blog Post Title Isn’t Showing Up

WordPress is a blogging platform, and while plugins and themes have allowed it to do pretty much anything you could want a website to do, at its heart, it’s always going to be a blogging platform.

So, when one of the core, most critically important features of a blog doesn’t work, you might understandably be a little miffed.

Unfortunately, things can go wrong with WordPress just like they can with anything else. Maybe you checked your blog and noticed something going wrong, or maybe you didn’t check, and someone else pointed it out. Either way, you checked your site, and you noticed that your blog posts don’t seem to have titles.

What’s going wrong? This is a surprisingly common issue, actually, and I’ve put together this list of five reasons why it might be happening, as well as a couple of other possibilities.

Cause #1: Theme and Plugin Conflicts

The first, and usually the most common, reason why your post titles aren’t showing up is because there’s some kind of conflict between plugins or themes that you’ve installed. Generally, you’ll see this show up shortly after you’ve installed a new plugin, but sometimes, it happens when a plugin or theme updates and it wasn’t tested for compatibility with the other plugins and themes you’re using. Since there are approximately twelve bajillion plugins and themes out there, not to mention frameworks like Genesis, Divi, and Gantry, it’s impossible to thoroughly test everything.

This is common because it’s not always obvious which plugins are conflicting. It’s not like you’ve added a plugin called Fancy Post Titles and found that it breaks your post titles. It’s more like a theme didn’t format its template properly and left an element out of the theme files, or an SEO plugin that tried to add Schema markup to the title accidentally overwrote something. It’s impossible to say exactly what happened since there are so many possibilities to generalize here.

The question is, how do you fix it?

Buckle in because it’s a little tedious.

First, change your theme. Don’t worry; you’re only doing this for a few minutes, so if anyone notices something wrong, they’ll probably chalk it up to a temporary bug. All you’re doing is checking to see if the issue is with your theme or if it’s with a plugin. If you change your theme and your title is still missing, then it’s likely caused by a plugin. If the title reappears, then you have an issue with your theme and can start digging around in theme files (or find a new theme to use) or approach the issue from another angle.

If, on the other hand, the issue persists, then it’s probably caused by a plugin.

That means you need to start in one of two ways.

• Disable all of your plugins. Then, re-enable them one by one, checking after each one to see which one causes the title to disappear.
• Disable one plugin and check. If the title doesn’t reappear, it’s not that plugin; if it does, it’s a different one, and you can re-enable the first one and disable the next.

Unfortunately, this is a tedious process. Doubly unfortunately, you can’t skip plugins you think are a hassle to turn on and off, or that you don’t think will impact the title, because you have no way of knowing.

Either way, when you discover where the conflict is, you then have to decide what to do about it. Do you leave the plugin disabled? Do you file a bug report with the plugin developers and work with them to fix the issue? Do you find an alternative plugin that does the same thing but doesn’t conflict? The choice is yours.

Cause #2: Posts Formatted as Asides

Do you know what an Aside is?

Introduced all the way back in WordPress 3.1, an Aside one of the many post formats. Post formats include Aides, Galleries, Links, Images, Quotes, Statuses, Videos, Audios, and Chats. All of them are essentially single pages with a single piece of information on them.

Why do these post formats exist? Well, they were originally designed to be handy for people who run blogs where the user is meant to spend all their time on the homepage, sort of like they would spend their time on a Facebook news feed. All of the various post formats, including regular posts, are things that can be added to that homepage “feed” and contain some kind of data.

The idea is that you have your regular posts, but in between your posts, you might want to add a brief snippet of information like a status update or tweet, or post a link to another website, or embed a video or podcast, or post a small chatlog. These show up inline in the feed on the homepage, but since they don’t need to be full posts, they don’t need to be pages of their own with titles and everything else.

A surprisingly common issue is that posts can, sometimes, end up formatted as asides. I’ve seen this happen when you’re tabbing between windows, accidentally tab to the post format, and change it when you go to type without focusing on the right element. You know, random user error, essentially.

This is much less of a common cause now than it used to be back when post formats were in common use. These days, a lot of themes don’t even support post formats, and those that do might not make it easy to use them. Plus, it was much more of an issue with the classic editor than it is with Gutenberg.

Fortunately, this is easy to check. Open the post up in your admin dashboard and look for the post format on the side. Check to make sure it’s still default, and not an Aside, or another format that would remove the title field from display. If it is, just change it back and you should be good to go.

Cause #3: Custom CSS Issues

This third cause might be exactly the issue, or it might have zero chance of being the issue, and it depends entirely on what kind of webmaster you are. If you’re the kind of person to install a theme, spend all your time customizing it through the dashboard, and work primarily with the content, you can probably skip this as the cause.

On the other hand, if you’ve ever edited your site’s CSS, then this one’s for you.

WordPress allows you to edit custom CSS directly from the dashboard without having to dig into your theme files and edit it there. This serves two purposes. The first is to make it so you don’t have to edit critical files that can break your whole site if you do something wrong with them. The second is to keep the changes separate so that if your theme updates and overwrites the files, your changes aren’t lost. It’s an additional layer of separation and sandboxing to keep things running smoothly.

To check if you’ve changed the CSS, you need to go to the appearance tab on your admin control panel, scroll down to customize, and find additional CSS. There, you can see any CSS that has been added to your site.

What you’re looking for is specific CSS referring to the .entry-title class or titles in general. Usually, CSS refers to a specific post ID or page ID, but it can also be genericized, which means it encompasses all of your titles in a given class. Either way, if you see these, you might see something like “display: none;” which turns off the visibility of the title. Remove that, and you’re golden.

The only question then is why it was there in the first place, which is a mystery you’ll need to ask yourself later.

Realistically, your title won’t be set to no display. It’s more likely that you have different formatting applied to the title, and something is going wrong. Maybe you wanted to set the font size and added an extra zero, or you set it to the wrong color via a typo, and it matches your background, or maybe it got shifted a thousand pixels to the left and is still there, just off-screen. These kinds of things happen. Check over your code and make sure you know what it’s all doing.

One important note here is that your custom CSS doesn’t have to be on the WordPress end of things. You can have CSS files in your site’s web hosting that will apply if they’re called, so you might not find the tags there. I recommend visiting your live page, inspecting the title block (where the title should be) with the Chrome developer tools, and looking to see if the display:none text or any other conflicting title CSS is visible. If it is, you can track down what file it comes from, what line it’s on, and how to fix it from there.

Cause #4: Broken Template Tags

Another reason your post titles might not show up is if the title block is removed from the template file in your theme. This can happen because of broken code in an update, an issue with the file when it’s uploaded and updated, or an intentional edit.

For most templates, you’re looking for the single post template file, which will have the elements of the post listed, usually in PHP. If there’s broken or missing code, this can cause problems.

It’s also possible that you’re using custom page or post types, which are added by a theme or plugin. If that’s the case, you’ll need to see if one of those is the cause. Ideally, Cause #1 above helped you find the issue, though.

Cause #5: Other Options

With the four most likely options out of the way, let’s talk about a few of the others that I’ve seen in brief.

Elements shifted and overlapped the title. It’s entirely possible that you have, say, a header image, a top bar plugin, or another CTA plugin, and that plugin is meant to overlay on top of your other content. However, instead of shifting the title around to be visible, it overlaps, and the title is underneath another element on the page. In that case, Google, social networks, and even your post itself will still have the title; it just won’t be visible. This is often a CSS alignment issue or a script alignment issue, so you’ll need to dig into those to figure out what’s going on.

You used a different kind of page. I already mentioned post formats above, but you can also create custom templates for different kinds of pages. It’s common to have landing pages, for example, which don’t have titles because they don’t need them. If you chose the wrong format, the title might not display, even if you specify it in the content itself.

You left the title field blank. Titles, in the HTML sense, are required for a valid webpage. But they aren’t actually required for WordPress posts. Usually, WordPress will make its own title out of the first sentence of your content, but sometimes, it only does that for the meta information and leaves the page title in the H1 blank. In that case, you need to go in and specify the title properly.

You’re using a plugin that removes titles. While it might seem like something I shouldn’t need to point out, I’ve seen people install a plugin like Hide Page and Post Titles with the intent on using it for specific kinds of landing pages, and forget to limit it just to those posts, or accidentally apply it to more. Again, disabling plugins should identify this issue, but it’s worth checking.

Regardless, the post title is one of the most important parts of a piece of content, so you definitely don’t want it to go missing for long. If you have a title disappear, it’s worth hunting down to see why it happened so you can fix it.

And hey, if you need ideas for what your post titles should be, why not give Topicfinder a try? The free trial should be enough to convince you it’ll pull its weight for your marketing.

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