How to fix empty heading on WooCommerce
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 WooCommerce
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance → Theme File Editor (or use a child theme) and search your template files (e.g. single-product.php, archive.php) for `<h1>`, `<h2>`, `<h3>` tags with no inner text.
- For pages built with the Block Editor (Gutenberg), open the page/post, look for Heading blocks that are empty, and either type content into them or delete the block.
- For pages built with Elementor: open the page in Elementor, switch to the Navigator panel (View → Navigator), look for Heading widgets with no text in the Content → Title field, add text or delete the widget.
- For pages built with Divi: open the page in Divi Builder, find Heading modules with an empty 'Heading Text' field, fill them in or remove the module.
- Install the 'WP Accessibility' plugin (by Joe Dolson) which includes a heading-structure checker under Tools → Accessibility to help locate remaining issues.
- Re-test with the WAVE browser extension.
<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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