One H1, and Why Your Template Probably Has Three
Multiple H1s are almost never an author decision. They come from the theme, which means one edit fixes every page on the site at once.
A page should have exactly one H1, stating what the page is about. If your inspection reported four, an author did not write four headings and mark them all as the most important thing. A template did it, which is good news, because it means one file has the fix for every page you publish.
The three usual suspects
The logo wrapped in an H1
Older themes do this, sometimes conditionally on the homepage and sometimes everywhere. The result is that every page on the site declares its most important heading to be the company name, and whatever the page is actually about arrives one level down.
Section components that use H1 for their own title
Common on visual builders. Each section type renders its heading, and the heading level was chosen by whoever built the component, based on how it looked. Drop three of those onto a page and you have three H1s.
The hero and the content both claiming it
The template renders a hero heading as H1, and the content body starts with its own H1 because the author typed one. Two, on every page, forever.
What the level is actually for
Heading levels are structure, not size. H1 says "this is what the page is about." H2 says "this is a section of it." When several elements claim to be the top of the outline, anything building a document outline has to pick one, and it will not always pick yours.
If a heading is the wrong size, that is CSS. Changing the tag to fix the appearance is how a document ends up with an outline that means nothing.
Zero is also a finding
Less common but worse in one respect: the page states its subject nowhere in its structure. Usually this happens when a design uses a large styled div instead of a heading element, because the designer wanted control over the appearance and the developer gave it to them the quickest way.
Making the repair once
Do not fix this page by page. Find where the H1 is emitted and decide, at that level, which element gets it. On most sites that is two or three files:
- The header or layout template, if the logo is wrapped.
- The hero or page-title partial.
- Whichever section component was built with a hardcoded level.
Then check a handful of different page types, because templates rarely cover every case and the exception is usually the one page that matters commercially.
The eyebrow question
Some designs put a short, stable label above the big marketing headline. Which one gets the H1 is a real decision, not a rule. A short keyword-bearing label that stays the same for years is arguably the better H1 than a headline that gets rewritten every quarter, and putting the H1 on the stable element is a defensible choice.
What is not defensible is both of them being H1. Pick one.
How to confirm the repair landed
curl -s https://example.com/your-page/ | grep -o '<h1' | wc -lThe answer should be 1. Run it against three different page types, not just the one you were looking at.
Run this against your own page. The inspection reports whether the repair described here is actually needed, and what else is sitting next to it.