Heading Tag Checker
The H1 To H6 Outline

What A Heading Outline Is For

Headings are not big text. They are the table of contents a page builds for itself, and two groups read that contents rather than the page.

Screen reader users jump between headings to reach the part they want. Crawlers read the same structure to work out what a long page covers.

So an outline with no H1, or one that jumps from H2 to H4, reads like a contents page with chapters missing.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative puts it the same way in its guidance on page structure: headings describe sections, and the levels describe how those sections nest.

One H1, And Why

The H1 says what the whole page is about. One of them, at the top, matching the subject of the page.

HTML5 technically allows several, because sections were meant to create their own outlines. Browsers never implemented that outline, so in practice one H1 remains the rule.

An h1 tag checker is therefore the quickest page audit there is. No H1 or three H1 tags both point at a template problem rather than a writing one.

Why A Skipped Level Matters

A jump from H2 to H4 tells assistive technology that a subsection sits inside something nothing ever opened.

Nearly every fix comes down to styling. Somebody wanted smaller text, so they used a lower level, and the heading elements reference is clear that size belongs in CSS.

Style the H3 to look how you want. Then the outline stays honest and the page still looks right.

Empty Headings

A heading wrapped around an image, an icon, or nothing at all. A screen reader announces "heading, blank", which is worse than no heading, and this analyser marks each one.

The Outline View and the Page View

Address mode fetches a live page from this server, because your browser may not read another site on your behalf.

Markup mode reads what you paste, entirely in your tab. So it covers a staging site behind a password, a page still in the editor, or a template fragment.

The status line says which mode is running. Nothing leaves the tab in markup mode, and the footer states the difference.

How People Actually Use An Outline

A screen reader can list every heading on a page and jump straight to one. That list is the outline this tool draws, in the same order.

Sighted readers do something similar by eye. They scan down the page for a heading that matches what brought them there, and they read from that point.

Both behaviours reward the same thing: headings that describe their section and sit at the right level. Neither rewards a keyword stuffed into an H2.

So write the outline first, then fill it in. A page that reads well as a list of headings usually reads well as prose.

Headings And Long Pages

A long page lives or dies by its outline. Past about a thousand words, nobody reads top to bottom, and the headings become the navigation.

Google also pulls section links from a clear structure on some results, which gives a long page more than one entry point.

Therefore a page with fifteen sections needs fifteen honest headings, not five headings and ten bold lines.

Reading The Tree This Tool Draws

The tree indents each heading under the one above it, so a jump from H2 to H4 shows as a gap you can see rather than a warning you have to read.

Bold red marks the second H1, if a page carries one. That is the fault worth fixing first.

Empty headings appear as a dash. A heading with only an icon inside it tells a screen reader nothing at all.

And the count at the top says how many of each level the page uses. Nine H3 headings under one H2 usually means the section wanted splitting.

Why Headings Help Readers More Than Rankings

Stuffing keywords into an H2 stopped working long ago. A clear heading structure helps a crawler understand a long page, and it helps a reader far more, which is the better reason.