Heading checker — H1 count and heading order

Quick answer: paste a URL and see the heading counts by level, whether there is exactly one H1, and whether any level is skipped — read from the raw HTML, the way a crawler sees it.

One H1, and what a second one usually means

Multiple H1s are not a penalty, and Google has said so directly. The reason to care is what a second H1 normally is: a theme wrapping the logo, a promotional bar, or a drawer title in a heading tag for styling reasons. The page then has two competing statements of what it is about, and only one of them is true.

Fix it because it is wrong for a reader, not because a ranking depends on it.

The ordering problem nobody can fix with an app

On most ecommerce themes the H1 is not the first heading in the HTML. Something global renders before the main content — most often a cart drawer, which is invisible until opened and present on every page. Country and language selectors and announcement bars do the same thing.

This matters because it is genuinely unfixable from an app. Headings that render before the main content live in theme Liquid, and no Shopify Admin API can reorder them. A tool that claims to auto-fix heading order on a hosted store is describing something it cannot do; the honest output is to name the file and let a person edit it.

Skipped levels are an accessibility defect

Jumping H2 to H4 costs very little in search. It costs a screen-reader user navigating by heading a section that appears to be missing. Treat it as accessibility work that happens to tidy the document.

Sections are what make a page quotable

An answer engine lifts a passage, not a page. Section boundaries are what let it find one. A two-thousand-word page with two H2s is one undifferentiated block — perfectly readable, and with nothing an engine can extract as the answer to a specific question.

If the goal is being cited rather than only ranked, headings shaped like the questions people ask do more than any other single change. Answer engine optimization covers the rest.