Title tag not working

isign4jc,

I don’t even see a title tag in the source for that page; is it possible that the theme isn’t outputting one? See if there is a title tag in the header.php of your theme. I’d suggest troubleshooting this by firstly trying to use a different theme, such as Twenty Eleven, either on that site if possible or on a development site.

Hi Peter, thanks for the quick response. I am using a custom theme for both sites in question. Both sites have the required wp head tag and actually both showed titles at one point during development before they disappeared. I “think” on the most recent one, I noticed the title disappeared after I changed the Site Title and the Tagline in the General settings area.

isign4jc,

The title tag is separate from wp_head(); see here. All you need to do is to have a line like this in the head section of your header.php:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Strange that I do not recall having to use this before and always thought the wp head tag took care of including that. And weird that it actually worked at one point without this tag. But, having said all that, you know what you’re talking about as the plugin author more than I do ?? So, I will add this in…thanks for the help!

I am having the exact same problem on our client’s blog https://www.fauxwoodbeams.com/blog. We just updated to version 2.0 and now the title tags are showing the theme default. When I look at the source code I can see the correct meta descriptions for each post, but no title tag anywhere. Help!

roundaboutmv,

Could you give me an example; for instance, if I look at this post, the title tag is set to “Faux Wood Workshop » Blog Archive » Fantastic Faux Wood Fireplace!”. Is this correct?

Sure. Nope, that’s not correct. The title tag we have entered in AISEO Pack is Fantastic Faux Wood Fireplace! | Faux Wood Workshop. It’s displaying correctly in the preview snippet, but on the real public side the title tags are being pulled from the theme default, set in the header.php as <title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

What’s strange is that we have a sister site https://www.fauxpanels.com/blog which has the exact same version of AISEO, but IS working properly, and they both have the same settings.

The only difference I could find between the two is that the client made the header.php not writeable in the one that’s not working. Could that be the culprit? Also strange that it’s pulling the correct meta description but not the title.

roundaboutmv,

Make sure you have Force Rewrites on under Performance; it looks like it is already, and there’s another plugin on your site that’s using output buffering, you may have to disable that plugin. Alternatively, you can turn Force Rewrites off under Performance, and change the title tag in your header.php to read as follows:

<title><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Yup, Force Rewrites is turned on. I’ll ask the client make the header.php writeable to change the title code and see if that method works.

This plugin can be affected by the positioning of the WordPress header – <?php wp_head(); ?>. If you place it above the way your theme handles the page <title>, then your theme will override the plugin’s title tags. If you place the WordPress header below, eg just before </head>, then the plugin (if affected by this issue) will work.

EzraSky,

Yes, thanks for the tip; see also the Codex page for wp_head() where they say “Put this template tag immediately before </head> tag in a theme template (ex. header.php, index.php).”