How to remove the site name from WordPress title tags

Step by step

1. Check where the site name comes from

View the source of a post and find <title>. Core builds it from parts: the page title, a page number on paginated views, and then the site name, joined by the separator. On the homepage the parts are the site name and the tagline instead. With Hydrogen SEO, the title comes from a template, and the shipped one for posts is %title% %separator% %site_name%.

2. Remove it for a whole content type

1. Go to Hydrogen SEO → Titles & Meta.
2. Select the type: Posts, Pages, a custom post type, Categories, Tags or one of the Archives.
3. In the Title field, change %title% %separator% %site_name% to %title%. For taxonomies, change %term_title% %separator% %site_name% to %term_title%.
4. Save your changes.

Every page of that type that has no hand-written SEO title now uses the shorter form. Types are independent, so you can keep the brand on pages and drop it from posts.

3. Remove it for one page only

Open the page, open the SEO Settings sheet (⌘E or Ctrl+E) and type the full title you want into SEO title, without the site name. A title typed there replaces the template for that page alone. This is the right tool for a page whose title already contains the brand, such as "About Acme Coffee", where the template would produce "About Acme Coffee | Acme Coffee".

4. Or move it to the front

Some sites put the brand first on a few page types, such as a store's category pages. Reorder the variables: %site_name% %separator% %term_title%. For most content, title first is the better order, because the words that match the search are then least likely to be cut off.

5. Without the plugin: filter the title parts

Core passes the parts as an array before joining them. Remove the site key:

add_filter( 'document_title_parts', function ( $parts ) {
    if ( ! is_front_page() ) {
        unset( $parts['site'] );
    }
    return $parts;
} );

Narrow it with conditions, for example is_singular( 'post' ), to affect only posts. The array can also contain title, page and, on the front page, tagline. This needs a theme that declares title-tag support, and it has no effect on a page where an SEO plugin supplies the whole title.

6. Check the result and the homepage

Purge the cache and read the titles:

curl -s https://example.com/a-post/ | grep -o "<title>[^<]*</title>"
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -o "<title>[^<]*</title>"

The post should show the title alone. The homepage should still carry your site name: never remove it there, since the homepage title is where the brand belongs.

7. Give Google the site name another way

Google shows a site name above each result, separate from the title, and it prefers to read that name from WebSite structured data on the homepage. Hydrogen SEO prints WebSite and Organization schema on the site for this. If the name Google displays is wrong after you shorten your titles, check that the homepage's structured data, title and visible heading all use the same name.

When to keep the site name

Keep it when the brand is short, when people search for you by name, or when your titles are short enough that it fits. A title of 30 characters with no brand looks bare in results. As a rule of thumb, if title plus separator plus site name stays within roughly 60 characters, there is little to gain from removing it. Measure yours in the SERP snippet preview, which checks pixel width.

What Google does with brandless titles

Google generates its own title links when it judges the title tag unhelpful, and it has said it may add a site name to a title where it considers that helpful. So removing the brand does not guarantee it disappears from results. The dependable gain is that the words you wrote are less likely to be truncated, since your own text now fills the available width.