Free Heading Structure Checker

Headings aren't just bigger, bolder text — they're a document outline. Screen reader users routinely navigate a page by jumping heading to heading, and a broken outline (a heading that skips from H2 straight to H4, or a page with three H1s) makes that navigation confusing or misleading. Search engines read the same structure to figure out what your page is actually about and how its sections relate to each other.

The practical rules: use exactly one H1 per page — it's the page's main title, not a design element to sprinkle around. Don't skip levels; an H2 section can contain H3 subsections, but jumping an H2 straight to an H4 leaves a gap in the outline that doesn't correspond to anything. And a heading with no text defeats its own purpose — it's a landmark pointing at nothing.

Worth being honest about scope: none of this is a confirmed direct Google ranking factor on its own. But a clean heading structure makes your content easier to scan, easier to feature in a snippet, and easier for both people and machines to parse correctly — which shows up in the metrics that do matter, like time on page and how easily your content gets pulled into search features.