"Just another WordPress site" in your title: clearing the default tagline

What it looks like

Before

<title>Northgate Roofing – Just another WordPress site</title>

After

<title>Northgate Roofing | Roof Repairs and Replacements in Leeds</title>

Find every place it appears

The tagline is a site-wide setting that many components read. Check your own output first:

for u in / /feed/ /wp-json/; do
  echo "$u: $(curl -s "https://example.com$u" | grep -oi 'just another wordpress site' | wc -l)"
done

Then look at each of these:

• The homepage <title>. WordPress core builds the front-page title as site name, separator, tagline. Many SEO templates do the same: Hydrogen SEO's default homepage template is %site_name% %separator% %tagline%.
• The homepage meta description and og:description, when a template or theme falls back to the tagline.
• The theme header, under the logo or site title.
• The RSS feed, in the channel <description> that feed readers and aggregators display.
• The REST API root at /wp-json/, which exposes it as description.
• Schema markup, where the WebSite or Organization description may use it.

Then check Google: search site:example.com "Just another WordPress site". Also search the phrase with your brand name to catch a staging or old copy of the site.

Fix the source

1. Go to Settings → General.
2. Replace the Tagline with a short, specific statement of what the site is, or clear it. An empty tagline is better than a placeholder.
3. Save.

A useful tagline names the offer and, where relevant, the place or audience: "Roof repairs and replacements in Leeds", "Recipes for small kitchens". Avoid slogans that could belong to any business.

On a multisite network the default for new sites is "Just another [network name] site", so check each site's settings.

Then fix the homepage title on purpose

Changing the tagline changes the homepage title wherever the tagline is used, which is an improvement but still a by-product. The homepage title is the most visible title you have; write it deliberately.

In Hydrogen SEO, open the Homepage screen and set the title and description there, or, if your homepage is a static page, in that page's SEO Settings sheet. Pick one of the two places and keep to it. The options and the template default are described in homepage SEO settings. Lead with the brand, follow with what you do, and check the width in the SERP snippet preview.

View the source afterwards and confirm the <title>, the meta description and the Open Graph tags all read as intended. The Open Graph preview shows what a shared link will display.

Clear out other default content while you are there

Sites with the default tagline often still have the rest of the starter content. Each of these can be indexed:

• The "Hello world!" post at /hello-world/, with its sample comment from "A WordPress Commenter".
• The "Sample Page" at /sample-page/.
• The default "Uncategorized" category, which can be renamed under Posts → Categories and its slug changed.
• A draft Privacy Policy page with unfilled placeholder text, if it was published as is.
• Theme demo content imported with a starter template: placeholder services, team members and lorem ipsum posts.

Delete what has no purpose. Deleted posts return 404, which is correct for content that never should have existed; no redirect is needed unless something links to them. Search site:example.com "Hello world" and site:example.com "Sample Page" to see whether Google has them.

Get Google to pick up the change

1. Purge the page cache and CDN so the new title is served.
2. In Search Console, inspect the homepage URL and click Request indexing.
3. Do the same for any other page that displayed the tagline.

The title in results updates after the page is recrawled and reprocessed, usually within days for a homepage. If Google continues to show old text after a recrawl, confirm no second <title> element remains in the source; a hard-coded title in the theme is the usual reason. See also Google rewrites the title tag.

Run the homepage through the free SEO audit as a final check. It reports the title and description it found and whether their lengths are in range, which catches a homepage that lost its description when the tagline was cleared.