One H1 Per Page

A page should have exactly one <h1>, and it should describe what the whole page is about — think of it as the title of the document, the same way a book has one title even though it has many chapter headings inside it.

<h1>Homemade Pizza Dough</h1>
<h2>Ingredients</h2>
<h2>Instructions</h2>

Stuffing a page with several <h1> tags — one per section, say — breaks the outline that screen readers and search engines build from your headings. Instead of one clear topic, they see several competing 'most important' headings and have no way to tell which one the page is really about.

This isn't a hard rule enforced by browsers — a page with three <h1> tags will still render just fine. It's a convention that keeps a page's structure meaningful, the same way a well-organized document only ever has one main title even if it has many sections underneath it.

Why should a page normally have only one <h1>?

A browser will refuse to display a page that contains more than one <h1> element.

Using several <h1> tags on one page confuses the ____ that screen readers and search engines build from your headings.