How to fix heading order on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Go to Storefront → My Themes → click Customize on your active theme, or click Advanced → Edit Theme Files.
2. Open the relevant Handlebars template (e.g., templates/pages/product.html, templates/pages/home.html) and correct any heading tags that skip levels.
3. For content widgets placed via Page Builder (Storefront → Page Builder), click into each Text or HTML widget that contains headings, switch to the HTML source view, and correct the heading tags.
4. For static web pages, go to Storefront → Web Pages, edit the page, switch the rich-text editor to HTML source view, and fix heading levels there.
5. Republish/save changes and run the axe DevTools extension on the live page to confirm the fix.

<!-- INCORRECT: skips from H1 directly to H3 -->
<h1>Product Name</h1>
<h3>Key Features</h3>   <!-- ❌ skips H2 -->
  <h4>Detail One</h4>

<!-- CORRECT: sequential, no levels skipped going downward -->
<h1>Product Name</h1>
<h2>Key Features</h2>   <!-- ✅ follows H1 -->
  <h3>Detail One</h3>   <!-- ✅ follows H2 -->

What is heading order?

Every webpage uses heading tags — H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 — to organize content into a hierarchy, like chapters and sub-chapters in a book. "Heading order invalid" means that hierarchy has a gap or jump: for example, jumping straight from an H1 to an H3, or using an H4 immediately after an H2. Screen readers and assistive technologies rely on this outline to help users navigate a page quickly. Headings should always nest in order — you can go up levels freely, but you should never skip a level going down.

For the roughly 1-in-4 shoppers who use assistive technology, broken heading order makes it very hard to navigate your pages — they may completely miss product sections, key offers, or checkout steps. This is a WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirement (Success Criterion 1.3.1 and 2.4.6), so non-compliance creates real legal risk under laws like the ADA (USA), the European Accessibility Act, and the UK Equality Act. Beyond accessibility, heading structure is one of the signals Google uses to understand your page's content hierarchy; a clean, logical outline helps search engines index and rank your pages more accurately. Fixing heading order is typically a quick win with immediate benefits for both users and SEO.

See the complete Heading order guide for every platform and the full background.