Why Having Two H1 Headings is Wrong
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
I’ve come back to this one several times over the last few years and I have to admit that including two H1 elements on a web page still makes no sense to me. Often you see one for the site or page title and the other for the logo - and a lot of very smart people say that’s fine both technically and in the spotlight of semantics. Here’s why I would consider that to be an unreasonable load of rubbish.
First, I’ll ask the reverse question - if two then why not three? Or four H1 headings? No, that wouldn’t make sense at all. So why do two of them make semantic sense? Really?
OK imagine you have a tree, you’ve inverted it so the trunk is at the top - there is your tree. Looks like a mini Document Object Model (DOM) tree, by the way. Only this is your H1 - H6 header tree. As you progress through that tree you have deepening levels of heading down to level six as appropriate.
Now try drawing that picture again with two H1 headings. Does it make any sense? I strongly doubt it.






