Page titles and meta descriptions in Joomla: which field wins

The blue line in a search result is your page title. The grey text under it is often your meta description. Joomla fills both from four or five different places, and which one wins depends on how the visitor reached the page. Once you know the order, you can stop guessing why Google shows "Home" for half your site.

You can check every page by hand with the steps below, or let our own SEO Check plugin score each article on its meta description and show the Google preview while you write.

Where the page title comes from

For a single article, Joomla checks whether the current menu item points to that exact article.

• Yes, there is a menu item for it. Joomla uses the Browser Page Title from that menu item's Page Display tab. Leave that field empty and it falls back to the menu item title, not the article title.
• No, the article is reached through a category blog or list. Joomla uses the article title.

The same logic applies to categories, contacts and most other components: a menu item that points straight at the page controls the title, everything else gets the item's own title. That explains the classic problem where the home page title reads "Home": the menu item is called Home and nobody filled in Browser Page Title. Open the menu item, go to Page Display, and type the title you want to see in Google.

The site name, before or after

In System > Global Configuration > Site, under SEO Settings, sits Site Name in Page Titles. Set it to After and every title becomes Article title - Site name. That is usually what you want, with one catch: the home page then shows the site name twice if the Browser Page Title already contains it. Write the home page title without the site name, or make it a short description of what the site offers.

Before is rarely a good choice. Google shows roughly the first 60 characters of a title, and with the site name in front, the part that differs per page is the part that gets cut off.

Where the meta description comes from

For the description Joomla walks a list and stops at the first field that is filled in:

1. The Meta Description of the article itself, on its Publishing tab. The same field exists on categories, contacts and tags.
2. The Meta Description on the menu item's Metadata tab.
3. The Site Meta Description in Global Configuration, under Metadata.

Step three is where many sites go wrong. Fill in one site-wide description, and every page without its own description gets that same text. Search engines see dozens of pages with an identical description and either ignore it or pick their own snippet from the page. If you are not going to write descriptions for most pages, leave the site description empty and let Google take a snippet from the content. That works better than one sentence repeated three hundred times.

What to actually write

• Title: under 60 characters including the site name. Put the words people search for first. One title per page, no two pages the same.
• Description: around 150 characters. Say what the reader gets on the page, not what your company is. Google may still rewrite it when it thinks another part of the page fits the search better; that is normal and not a sign that something is broken.
• Keywords: the Keywords field on articles has no effect on search engines. Joomla uses it internally for the Related Articles module, so fill it in only if you use that module.

The menu item trap

Because the menu item wins for titles but loses to the article for descriptions, the two can drift apart. A common sequence: an editor rewrites an article and its meta description, but the title in Google stays the same. The reason is a Browser Page Title on the menu item that was set two years ago. When a title refuses to change, check the menu item first.

The reverse also happens. You set a nice description on a menu item, but the article behind it has its own, older description, and the article wins. Clear one of the two so there is only one place to maintain.

Checking what Joomla outputs

Do not rely on the admin fields. Open the page, view the source, and search for <title> and name="description". That is what search engines read. Log out first or use a private window, because with page caching on, the version a logged-in admin sees can differ from what a visitor gets.

To check many pages at once, Google Search Console shows duplicate and missing titles indirectly under Pages, and any crawler such as Screaming Frog lists every title and description in one table. Sort by description and the pages that fall back to the site-wide text show up as one long block.

If the same article is reachable under several URLs, every one of them gets the same title and description. That is a separate problem with its own fix, covered in One article, six addresses: duplicate URLs in Joomla.