What is a site name?

Site name, title link and domain

A result has three text parts that are easy to mix up:

[icon]  Example Roasters                    ← site name
        https://example.com › guides        ← visible URL
Pour-Over Coffee Guide: Ratios and Timing   ← title link

The site name is the same for every page on the site. The title link changes per page. Because the site name already carries the brand, repeating a long brand suffix in every page title is less necessary than it used to be.

Where Google gets it

Google's documentation lists the sources it considers on the homepage:

• WebSite structured data, which is the way to state your preference;
• the og:site_name meta tag;
• the <title> element;
• heading elements such as the <h1>;
• other text on the homepage and references to the site elsewhere.

The most reliable setup is to make all of them agree.

The markup

Add this to the homepage only:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebSite",
  "name": "Example Roasters",
  "alternateName": ["ER", "example.com"],
  "url": "https://example.com/"
}

name is your preferred site name. alternateName lists acceptable fallbacks in order of preference, used when Google's systems do not select the first. Including the domain name as the last alternative is a sensible safety net. url must be the homepage of the domain or subdomain.

Rules and limits

• One name per site. Google supports site names at the domain and subdomain level. A subdirectory such as example.com/blog/ cannot have its own.
• The homepage must be crawlable and indexable. If Google cannot read it, it cannot read the markup.
• Pick a name that is concise and commonly recognised. Generic names such as "Best Coffee" are less likely to be chosen, and names that suggest another brand will not be.
• Be consistent. The http, https, www and non-www homepages should redirect to one version, and that version should carry the same name in all sources.
• Expect a delay. Changes show up after Google recrawls and reprocesses the homepage, which can take from days to several weeks.

When Google shows your domain instead of a name, it could not determine one with confidence. When it shows the wrong name, a conflicting source is usually to blame: an old tagline in the title, a different og:site_name, or leftover markup from a theme.

Setting it in WordPress

WordPress prints the Site Title from Settings → General in several of these places, so start by making that the real brand name and not a slogan. Core itself outputs no WebSite markup. Hydrogen SEO adds it, with fields for the website name and an alternate name on its Schema screen, and uses the site title for og:site_name; see homepage SEO and the WebSite schema reference.

Then verify: open the homepage source, confirm there is exactly one WebSite item with the right name, and that the homepage <title> and og:site_name match it. Our JSON-LD validator checks the syntax, and the URL Inspection tool lets you request a recrawl of the homepage after a change.