How to set the WordPress homepage title and meta description

Step by step

1. Find out which kind of homepage you have

Go to Settings → Reading and look at Your homepage displays. Your latest posts means the homepage is the blog index and no page exists to edit. A static page means a normal page is assigned as the homepage. This decides where the settings can live.

2. See what the homepage prints today

curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -oE "<title>[^<]*</title>|<meta name=\"description\"[^>]*>"

On a site with no SEO plugin you will see a title like "Site Title – Tagline" and no description line. If the tagline still reads "Just another WordPress site", every search result for your homepage is carrying it.

3. Set the basics in WordPress

Under Settings → General, set Site Title to your brand name as you want it shown, and Tagline to a short phrase saying what you do. Even with an SEO plugin these matter: the site title feeds the %site_name% variable used in every other title, and the tagline feeds %tagline%.

4. Write the homepage title

1. Open Hydrogen SEO → Homepage.
2. In Homepage title, write the title. The shipped default is %site_name% %separator% %tagline%.
3. Lead with what you offer where the brand alone says little: "Acme Coffee | Fresh-Roasted Beans Delivered Weekly" tells a stranger more than "Acme Coffee | Home".

Aim for a title that fits in about 60 characters. Keep the brand name in it, at the start or the end.

5. Write the meta description

In Homepage meta description, write one or two sentences that say what the site offers and for whom, around 120 to 160 characters. Google has no fixed length and truncates by pixel width, so put the important part first. Do not paste the tagline unless it explains the business. Check both fields in the snippet preview, then save.

6. Static front page: pick one place

With a static page as the homepage, you can also set its title and description in that page's own SEO Settings sheet. Either place works. Use one of them and leave the other empty, so two people on the team do not maintain conflicting values. Editing in the page's sheet keeps the settings next to the content. The Homepage screen keeps them with the site-wide settings.

7. Verify, then wait for the recrawl

Purge the page cache and run the curl command again. You should see your title and a <meta name="description"> line. In Search Console, inspect the homepage URL and click Request indexing to prompt a recrawl. The homepage is usually revisited quickly, but the displayed result can lag behind by days.

Without a plugin

The title follows Site Title and Tagline, and you can reshape it with the document_title_parts filter. For the description, print one from your child theme:

add_action( 'wp_head', function () {
    if ( is_front_page() ) {
        echo '<meta name="description" content="' . esc_attr( 'Fresh-roasted coffee beans, delivered weekly across the UK.' ) . '" />' . "\n";
    }
}, 5 );

is_front_page() is true for both homepage modes. Remove the snippet if you later install an SEO plugin, or the page will carry two descriptions.

When Google shows something else

Google may display a different title for a homepage, and for homepages it tends to favour the brand name it associates with the site. It may also build the snippet from page text instead of your description when that matches the query better. Both are normal. A title that includes your brand and a description that matches the visible content of the homepage are the best ways to have your own wording used. The social share card is set separately, in the OG title, OG description and OG image fields on the same Homepage screen.