Should a page have only one H1?
One is the clearest, and the HTML standard allows more. The thing that matters is that there is one at all: the H1 is the page announcing its own subject, and a page with none leaves a machine to guess. We pass a page with several H1s that carry text, and fail a page with none.
What it actually is
Headings are not font sizes, although that is how most sites end up using them. They are structure: the H1 is the title of the document, and everything under it is subordinate. The HTML standard explicitly allows a document to contain several top-level headings, so a page with more than one is not broken. It is simply less sharp about which subject comes first.
Why it matters
The H1 is one of the few signals that both machines and assistive technology depend on in the same way. Screen reader users navigate by heading, and answer engines pulling a citation need to know what the page is called before they can decide it answers anything. A page whose subject is unclear tends not to be chosen for either purpose, and the loss shows up as absence rather than as an error.
What good looks like
An H1 near the top of the page, ideally just one, stating that page's topic in plain language, and closely related to the title without being a word-for-word copy of it. Everything else that looks like a heading is marked up at the level that reflects its place in the structure rather than the size it happens to be.
Being honest about it
We used to warn on several H1s. We no longer do: the HTML standard allows multiple top-level headings, search engines have said for years that they do not penalise them, and each H1 that carries text still names a topic. A missing H1, or one that is empty, is the real gap and still fails. This is a clarity signal rather than a compliance one. Where it genuinely matters is on pages whose subject is not otherwise obvious, and on sites where the same template produces the same muddle across hundreds of pages at once.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure is the logo. A site puts its name in an H1 in the header, every page inherits it, and every page therefore announces itself as the company name rather than as its own subject. The other frequent one runs the opposite way: a page with no H1 at all, because the designer wanted smaller text at the top and reached for a lower heading level to get it.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 86% of the sites we could read passed the “The page has an H1” check.
Webflow sites pass it most often, at 94%. WordPress sites pass it least often, at 70%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it stayed at 67%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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