Introduction
Headings must be arranged in order from more important (Heading 1 and 2) to least important (Heading 3 to 6), and be nested in the correct way.
Heading 1 is always the page title that you can see in the page header, this level should only be used once on the page.
You can use Heading 2 as many times as needed for the main subject sections, and from then on each Heading level should be nested within the one above it.
- Heading 1 is for the page title in the header.
- Heading 2 is for the main sections.
- Heading 3 is for subsections under each Heading 2.
- Heading 4 is for sub-subsections under each Heading 3, and so on.
- Heading 5 and 6 follow the same rules, but should be used sparingly, as creating this many levels of subheadings makes content harder to follow.
Make sure the heading titles briefly describe the information the content is going to talk about. Vague headings make pages harder to understand.
Content pages
On content pages the Heading 2 element is created by the ‘Title’ field at the top of the content block.
On these pages do not add Heading 2 elements within your content blocks. If you need sub-headings you can use the ‘Paragraph’ dropdown in the content block ribbon to create headings starting with Heading 3.
News articles
On news articles there is a single content block, so you can use the ‘Paragraph’ dropdown in the content block ribbon to create headings starting with Heading 2.
Why it matters
The heading structure is used by assistive technology such as screen readers to identify the page sections for the listener. It is common for screen reader users to ask their technology to read out all the top level headings, or all the links in a document to quickly understand what information is being covered. This allows for much quicker navigation – rather than the reader having to listen to the entire page they can skip straight to the area they need.