How to fix empty heading on Squarespace
Find every empty heading tag on your store and add meaningful, visible text to it — or remove the tag entirely if it serves no structural purpose.
Steps for Squarespace
- Open Pages and click Edit on the affected page.
- Click on each content block. For Text blocks, look for lines formatted as Heading 1–4 that have no visible text (may appear as an empty line with heading formatting).
- Click the empty heading line and either type meaningful text or select that line and delete it with Backspace/Delete.
- For sections with custom code blocks (</> Code blocks), click Edit on the code block and search for empty `<h1>`–`<h6>` tags to fix in the HTML directly.
- Save and Preview. Use the WAVE extension on the live URL to confirm no empty headings remain.
<h2>Featured Collections</h2>
<!-- If text must be visually hidden but available to screen readers: -->
<h2>
<span class="sr-only">Featured Collections</span>
<!-- icon or decorative image here -->
</h2>
<!-- CSS for the sr-only class -->
<style>
.sr-only {
position: absolute;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
padding: 0;
margin: -1px;
overflow: hidden;
clip: rect(0, 0, 0, 0);
white-space: nowrap;
border: 0;
}
</style>What is empty heading?
A heading tag (like `<h1>`, `<h2>`, `<h3>`, etc.) exists in your page's code but contains no readable text inside it. This can happen when a developer uses a heading tag purely for visual spacing, when a theme or page-builder leaves a placeholder heading behind, or when an icon or decorative image is placed inside a heading without any accompanying text. Screen readers announce headings to blind and low-vision shoppers as navigation landmarks — when a heading is empty, the screen reader either announces nothing or says something confusing like "heading, level 2" with no label, which breaks the shopper's ability to understand or navigate your page.
Empty headings directly violate WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships) and 2.4.6 (Headings and Labels), which are legal compliance benchmarks in many countries under laws such as the ADA (US), AODA (Canada), and EAA (EU). Beyond legal risk, screen-reader users rely on headings to jump quickly between sections — an empty heading wastes a navigation stop and destroys the logical outline of your page. Google also uses heading structure to understand page content hierarchy; empty or meaningless headings weaken your on-page SEO signals and can suppress keyword relevance. Finally, conversion suffers: assistive-technology users who encounter broken navigation are more likely to abandon your store.
See the complete Empty heading guide for every platform and the full background.
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