How to fix landmark unique on WooCommerce

Steps for WooCommerce

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Appearance → Theme File Editor (or use a child theme and edit files via FTP/SFTP to avoid overwriting on updates).
2. Open header.php to find your primary <nav> element — typically output by wp_nav_menu() wrapped in a <nav> tag.
3. Add aria-label="Primary navigation" to that <nav> tag. For breadcrumbs (often in breadcrumb.php or a plugin template), add aria-label="Breadcrumbs".
4. For footer navigation, open footer.php and label its <nav> with aria-label="Footer navigation".
5. If you use a page builder (Elementor, Divi, etc.), switch to its HTML/code block or Custom Attributes panel for each navigation widget and add the aria-label attribute there.
6. Install the WP Accessibility plugin (by Joe Dolson) which can automate some landmark labelling, then re-run your scanner to verify.

<nav aria-label="Primary navigation">
  <!-- main site menu links -->
</nav>

<nav aria-label="Breadcrumbs">
  <!-- breadcrumb trail -->
</nav>

<!-- OR, using a visible heading already inside the landmark -->
<aside aria-labelledby="related-products-heading">
  <h2 id="related-products-heading">Related Products</h2>
  <!-- product cards -->
</aside>

What is landmark unique?

Landmarks are special HTML elements — like `<nav>`, `<header>`, `<footer>`, `<main>`, `<aside>`, and `<section>` — that act as signposts letting screen-reader users jump quickly around a page. When the same type of landmark appears more than once on a page (for example, two `<nav>` elements: one for the main menu and one for breadcrumbs), each one must have a distinct label so users know which is which. Without that label, a screen reader just announces "navigation" twice, leaving users unable to tell them apart. The fix is to add an `aria-label` attribute (e.g. `aria-label="Main menu"` and `aria-label="Breadcrumbs"`) or an `aria-labelledby` pointing to a visible heading inside the landmark.

For the roughly 7.5 million Americans who use screen readers, duplicate unlabelled landmarks make navigation genuinely confusing or impossible — they cannot tell which "navigation" or "complementary" region is which. This is a WCAG 2.1 failure (Success Criterion 1.3.6 / best practice under 2.4.1), which creates legal accessibility risk under the ADA, the UK Equality Act, and equivalent laws worldwide. Beyond legal exposure, an inaccessible store loses sales from disabled shoppers — an estimated $490 billion in disposable income in the US alone. Google also uses landmark structure as a crawl signal for understanding page architecture, so clean, labelled landmarks can marginally improve how Googlebot interprets your content hierarchy.

See the complete Landmark unique guide for every platform and the full background.