How to remove a duplicate title tag from a WordPress page

Step by step

1. Count the titles in the head

View the page source and search for <title. Or count from a terminal, looking only at the head:

curl -s https://example.com/a-post/ | sed -n '/<head/,/<\/head>/p' | grep -c "<title"

The answer should be 1. Restricting the check to the head matters: inline SVG icons in the page body often contain their own <title> elements for accessibility, and those are not document titles. An audit tool that counts every <title in the HTML will report a false alarm on such pages.

2. Compare the two titles

Print them:

curl -s https://example.com/a-post/ | sed -n '/<head/,/<\/head>/p' | grep -o "<title[^<]*</title>"

Their content is a clue. Identical text suggests the theme calls WordPress's title function twice. A plain "Post Title – Site Name" next to a customised one suggests the theme printing its own alongside an SEO plugin's. Two customised but different titles suggest two SEO plugins.

3. Check the theme's header.php

Open the active theme's header.php (classic themes only) and search for <title>. Themes written before WordPress 4.1 typically contain:

<title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); ?></title>

If the theme, a child theme or a plugin also declares add_theme_support( 'title-tag' ), WordPress prints a second title through wp_head(). The modern method is the theme support line and no <title> in the template.

4. Remove the hard-coded title

Copy header.php into a child theme if you have not already, delete the <title>...</title> line, and make sure this is in the child theme's functions.php:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', function () {
    add_theme_support( 'title-tag' );
} );

Confirm wp_head() is still called just before </head>. From then on, core or your SEO plugin builds the single title. Block themes have no header.php and always let WordPress print the title, so a duplicate there comes from a plugin.

5. Check for two SEO plugins

Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins and look for more than one plugin that manages titles and meta tags, including "lite" SEO features bundled in a theme framework or a page builder. Two of them active together print duplicate descriptions, canonicals and social tags as well as titles. Choose one, import settings into it if needed, and deactivate the other. Hydrogen SEO's Tools → Import SEO Data reads the titles and descriptions other SEO plugins stored; the order of steps is in fixing duplicate meta output.

6. Look for code that echoes a title

If neither applies, search the theme and custom plugins for <title and for functions hooked to wp_head that print one. Header-injection plugins and "insert code in head" boxes in theme options are common hiding places: someone pasted a full set of meta tags, title included, into a global header field years ago.

7. Verify across page types

Purge the cache and run the count again on the homepage, a post, a category archive and a search result. Each must return 1. Different templates can carry different mistakes, and the homepage is the one most often hand-edited.

How Hydrogen SEO handles the title

The plugin does not print a <title> element of its own. It supplies the title text through WordPress's pre_get_document_title filter, and through wp_title for older themes, so whichever element the theme or core prints carries the plugin's title. That means installing it never adds a second element. If two exist, both were there before, and the steps above still apply.

Why it matters

When the first title in the source is the stale, hard-coded one, your edits appear to do nothing: the SEO title you write is printed second and ignored by browsers. Search engines may pick either, or write their own. Removing the duplicate is what makes title changes take effect predictably. After the fix, expect search results to update as pages are recrawled, not at once.