How To Change Site Title In Wordpress Blog

WordPress site title

Let's settle this topic once and forever: site title and tagline are not the same thing.

Let's take them one by one.

Site title: is the name of your site. It's how your brand gets identified. Now, each page from your site will have its own title. Don't confuse it with the "site title", which is the "title of all titles" :).

Site tagline: represents a short description of your entire website. It resembles a statement or a slogan.

Why are titles and the tagline important on a website?

There are 3 main reasons here:

They increase the relevancy of the website content to users. Visitors can easily understand what the website or a particular page is about.
They reinforce the power of the brand. Together with other elements on the website, the title and tagline can give the force of expression and define the personality of the brand.
They increase relevancy for search engine bots. Depending on the quality of the title and tagline (e.g. inclusion of a keyword might be a sign of quality), search engines might decide to rank the website higher in search engine results pages. Also, a good tagline increases the click-through rate (clicks for opening the website link) in search engine results.

WordPress title tags and taglines

As mentioned earlier, the title represents the name of your site/blog/online shop.

Now, let's take Colibri's blog as an example. I'm going to right-click on the page, then choose View Page Source. Let's now hit CTRL F and look for "title":

<title> is an HTML title tag, which we can also call the SEO title. The title above is the one that shows up in organic results when looking for "Colibri blog" or related terms. The SEO title is followed by the page URL and a meta description.

All your website pages and blog posts should have relevant title tags. There's one difference though. In the case of your website's homepage, the HTML title tag encompasses both the title and the tagline. The rest of the pages will not contain a tagline. WordPress site title and tagline example

The site title and tagline also show up in the tab where you open the site.

Site title showing up in the browser's tab

Now, let's see how to make changes to your WordPress title and tagline.

Methods to change the site title and tagline in WordPress

Method 1: from the WordPress Admin Dashboard

Log in to the WordPress Admin Dashboard with the username and password you set for the new website.
In the left-hand menu, go to Settings -> General Settings.

Homepage title and tagline setup in WordPress

In the dashboard area, Site Title and Tagline are the first sections you have to customize:

The site title should represent your brand. The tagline should reflect what you do and set up expectations for your website's visitors. Further down the article, we'll show you how to make sure the title and tagline are catchy enough to keep your readers hooked.

Method 2: from the theme Customizer

In the WordPress Admin Dashboard, go to Appearance in the left-hand menu. Next, go to Customize.

Access the Customizer of the theme you installed for the new website.

Go to General Settings -> Site Identity. From this subsection, you can customize the site title and tagline.
change site title

Fill in the blank spaces with the site title and tagline of your own.
One note: you might be as creative as you like, in composing your title and tagline. The more you go creative in crafting these short phrases, the likelier it will be you'll attract visitors to read more and discover more of your website. This means relevant traffic to the website.
Here are some examples of creative taglines used by companies in different industry areas.

WordPress page titles

Remember when I mentioned above that only the homepage has a tagline? The rest of the pages and posts on your site have just a title. This title should be relevant to the topic on the page. Some of these titles might include the brand in the title, some of them, not.

Now, the moment you create a new WordPress blog post, you will have to give it a name. That name is your title but it can differ from your SEO title. If you use a plugin such as Yoast SEO, you can assign an SEO title, that will show up in the organic search results. Why would you have a separate SEO title? Because you might consider making it more SEO-friendly than the actual title.

SEO title

How can you write catchy taglines and page titles in WordPress?

Use keywords when you change the site title in WordPress.

It's important to integrate relevant keywords in the site title and tagline. This is the place you should benefit from using the main keyword representative of the whole website. Use the keyword once, and add context to it, accordingly.

Try to use semantically related keywords, so the main keyword should have more weight for search engines.

Avoid keyword stuffing when you change the site title in WordPress.

It's useful to have the main keyword in the site title, however, don't overuse keywords. Otherwise, too many keywords in the site title will be considered as spam. This might result in your website being penalized by Google.
The best way to avoid keyword stuffing is to make sure the site title has the coherence of a phrase. Instead of enumerating key expressions, you have to ensure this title is an explicit sentence that sets users' expectations correctly, right off the bat.

Place the keywords at the beginning of your title.

It's recommended that you place your main keyword at the beginning of the site title. This is a signal that your title focuses on the expression best defining your activity. Also, by its placement, the keyword will be the first element search engine bots crawl in the source code of your website.
So, think of formulating the phrase in such a way that it emphasizes the main keyword corresponding to the website pages.

Here is a study on how the presence of a keyword in title influences the website rankings:

Source

When you change the site title, use an optimal length.

You should pay attention to the length of your title. If it's too long, it will be "cut" by search engines and it won't display properly in search engine results. As a result, this area won't be fully used to transmit to visitors what's important about your website. If it's too short and only consists of an expression, it will not explain enough to visitors what the website is about.
According to SEO rules, the website title should not exceed 70 characters-length. This is the maximum you can extend the title to and ensure web surfers fully visualize it in search engine results pages.
Optimized website title:

Differentiate between the title of your homepage and the titles of all the other pages.

If you really want to benefit from optimized titles, you should think of customizing them for every page in the website. So, make unique page titles for all pages in the website, and differentiate them from the main website title (that appears for the homepage).
In this way, every page will have its corresponding title. It's a good place where you can use a keyword that sums up what that webpage is all about. Also, creating different titles for different pages, you avoid duplicate content that's penalized by search engines.

Do I need to brand the site title?

It might be of use to include the brand name in the title. However, do it carefully and place (if possible) the brand name at the end of your phrase.
Also, Google might automatically add the company name at the end of the sentence which represents your title.
This branding element makes the title easy to be recognized as belonging to your website and company. It ensures your website is remembered by visitors, so they can easily come back to your pages.

Complete site identity customizations in website

Besides formulating a website title, you can also add other customizations that shape the website identity.
Among them, we can mention:

Using a favicon

A favicon is an image representative for the website, that users will see in the browser tab where they open your website pages. It should be carefully chosen, and it has to be easy to associate with the specificities of your website/business. Due to a favicon, the website will be recognized quickly and remembered as simple as that.

Using an image logo

For a more professional look of the website, you might consider including an image logo. Together with the site title, the company logo will speak volumes about your business and its value on the market.

Using a certain color scheme for branding purposes

Together with a site title and a logo, a professional color scheme will help your website stand out from the crowd. All these elements should be tweaked and refined until they best represent your business and brand.