The business changed its name, or the site was built under a working title that never got replaced, or the browser tab still says “Just another WordPress site” under your company name. Whatever the reason, the words WordPress uses to name your site are wrong, and you want them fixed without breaking anything.
To change the site title in WordPress you need one field and one button. What trips people up is that the same words appear in several places, and some of those places never read from that field. So below you will find where the title and tagline are stored, how to edit them in both kinds of theme, and the usual reasons an old name hangs on.
Site title and tagline: what each one is
The site title is your site’s name, usually your business name. The tagline is a short line describing it, such as “Family dental practice in Salt Lake” or “Handmade oak furniture from Jaipur”. Both are stored once, as site settings, and themes and plugins read them from there.
WordPress’s own help text says most themes show the title at the top of every page, in the browser’s title bar and as the name of your feeds, and many also show the tagline. Where exactly they appear depends on your theme.
How to change the site title in WordPress from Settings
This method works on every WordPress site, whatever the theme.
- Log in as an Administrator. Other roles cannot open this screen.
- Go to Settings → General.
- Edit the Site Title field at the top.
- Edit, replace or empty the Tagline field below it.
- Scroll to the bottom and press Save Changes.
Leave the other fields on that screen as they are. The two address fields in particular, WordPress Address and Site Address, are not related to your site’s name, and changing them by mistake can lock you out.
Then open your website in a private browser window and check the header and the browser tab.
Changing it where your theme shows it
Your theme decides how the title and tagline are displayed, and gives you a second place to edit them.
Block themes (Site Editor)
On a block theme (the recent default themes are all of this kind), the header usually contains a Site Title block and sometimes a Site Tagline block.
- Open Appearance → Editor, choose Patterns or Templates, and pick the header part.
- Click into the Site Title block and type the new name.
- Press Save. WordPress will list what you are saving, which includes the site title itself.
This edits the same setting as Settings → General, so the new name appears everywhere, not only in the header. The block’s sidebar also controls display options, such as whether the title links to the home page and its typography.
Classic themes (Customizer)
- Go to Appearance → Customize.
- Open Site Identity. The title and tagline fields here are the same settings again.
- Many themes add a checkbox here for whether to display the title and tagline in the header. If your name is missing from the header but correct in Settings, this checkbox is often why.
- Press Publish.
Page builders and logos
If the header was built in Elementor or a similar builder, the name may be typed directly into a text or heading widget, or the header may show a logo image with the old name baked into it. In both cases, editing the WordPress setting changes the browser tab but not what visitors see in the header. You need to edit the header template in the builder, or replace the logo; our post on replacing the logo on your site covers that side.
Where the title and tagline show up
| Place | Where the text comes from |
|---|---|
| Site header | The theme’s Site Title block or header settings, or a builder widget or logo image |
| Browser tab | The title tag, built by WordPress or by your SEO plugin |
| Google results | Mostly the title tag, plus a site name Google chooses for itself |
| Feeds | The site title setting |
| WordPress system emails | The site title setting, in square brackets in the subject line |
The browser tab
Without an SEO plugin, WordPress builds each page’s title tag from the page name followed by the site title. On the home page it is usually the site title followed by the tagline. That is why a forgotten default tagline appears in the tab of your home page.
When an SEO plugin overrides it
If you run Rank Math, Yoast SEO or a similar plugin, the title tag is built from the plugin’s own templates instead. These usually pull in the site title through a variable, so a change in Settings flows through. But if someone typed the old business name into a template or into an individual page’s SEO title, it stays there until you edit it. Some SEO plugins also keep their own copy of the site name for structured data, so look through the plugin’s general or title settings after renaming. Writing good SEO titles for each page is a separate job, covered in our post on editing SEO titles and meta descriptions.
Google’s results
Google picks up the change when it next crawls your pages, which can take days or longer, and it may rewrite titles in its results anyway. The site name Google shows near your address is chosen by Google from several signals on your site. You can influence it, not set it directly.
Writing a tagline worth keeping
A tagline should tell a visitor who has just landed what the business does, and often where. Some practical points:
- Keep it short enough to read at a glance in a header.
- Say what you do in the words your customers use. “Plumbing repairs in North London” beats “Excellence in every pipe”.
- Do not stuff it with keywords. It is read by people first.
- If your design has no room for it and you do not want it in the home page tab, emptying the field is a perfectly good choice.
When the new name does not appear
- Caching. A caching plugin, your host or a service like Cloudflare may serve the old page for a while. Clear the cache and check in a private window.
- A theme or builder field. Look for a header text widget, a footer copyright line or an options panel that holds the old name typed by hand.
- The logo. If the header shows an image, no text setting will change it.
- The SEO plugin. Search its title templates and the home page’s own SEO title for the old name.
- The favicon. If the small tab icon still shows the old brand, that is a separate image; see setting a site icon.
Undoing a change is simple: type the old text back in the same field and save. Nothing else depends on these two fields, which is why this is one of the safer edits in the dashboard. If you are still finding your way round the admin screens, our tour of the WordPress dashboard shows where everything sits, and the wider guide to managing a WordPress website collects the other owner tasks.
Frequently asked questions
After renaming, do I have to edit the title of every page as well?
No. Each page keeps its own title, such as About or Contact, and WordPress adds the site name from the setting wherever the theme or SEO plugin asks for it. You only need to visit pages where someone typed the old business name by hand, in the text, a heading or that page’s own SEO title.
Why does Google still show my old business name?
Google only updates what it shows after it recrawls the site, and that can take days or weeks. The site name near your address is chosen by Google from several signals, including structured data your SEO plugin outputs. Check that the plugin’s own site name setting is updated, then give it time. Search Console lets you request indexing of the home page.
Can I show my logo instead of the title text?
Yes. Most themes let you upload a logo in the Site Logo block in the Site Editor, or under Site Identity in the Customizer. Keep the site title setting filled in even when a logo replaces it in the header, because the browser tab, feeds and system emails still use the text version.
Should my tagline include keywords?
Write it for the person reading it, not for search engines. A plain description of what you do and where usually contains the words customers would search for anyway. Repeating search phrases makes the header look odd and does nothing useful, since the tagline is a small element compared with your page titles and content.
Rebrands tend to leave the old name in odd corners: a builder header, a footer someone typed by hand, an SEO template. When you have checked the obvious places and it still turns up, that kind of search-and-tidy job is part of what our WordPress support service covers.
Next in this series: How to Set the Homepage in WordPress
