Page title

[stevenaproctor]

What

How page titles should be formatted in services to complement page titles on GOV.UK.

Why

There is nothing documented in any guidance about the best way to design page titles except a short reference in the URL section of Writing for user interfaces. There is inconsistency across services and guidance.

All pages must have a unique page title and this is a need shared across government.

Anything else

HMRC already has documentation about this in our design system that gives advice about:

• when to use
• when not to use and removing personally identifiable information for security reasons
• how it works
• an example
• code
• research based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

[fofr]

For clarification this is for text that appears in the <title> element.

---

On DfE’s Publish teacher training courses we’ve largely been using:
[state if any][page title] – [service name] - GOV.UK

Where state is Error or Success. This is based on the guidance from https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/error-summary/#how-it-works

[mikeash82]

@gavinwye commented on 1 Feb 2017

Original conversation relating to this in HMRC slack: https://hmrcdigital.slack.com/archives/community-ux/p1485950134000025

As reccomended bny Chris Moore to Phil Sherry
[page title] - [section name] - [service name] - GOV.UK
[page title] should mirror h1 on that page.

@gavinwye commented on 2 Oct 2017
Page titles get passed to google analytics, therefore, it's important that they don't contain any personal information.

@gordonmcmullan commented on 13 Mar

Discussion Summary from the hackday

@timsb commented on 12 Sep

Currently the page title documentation states that

if there is personally identifiable information in the <h1>, replace it so is not recorded in Google Analytics.

It's possible to send a custom page title to GA using either ga('set', 'title', 'My page title'); or virtual page views and leave out personally identifiable information. The documentation should be updated to include this information. This would enable services to keep the titles they want to have rather than being limited by the information we can send to GA

[colinrotherham]

Just to add, we recently found it documented (but tucked away) on this page:
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/service-unavailable-pages/

‘Sorry, the service is unavailable – service name – GOV.UK’ as the page title

Which seems to suggest:

[page title] – [service name] – GOV.UK

Note the – is an en-dash, not a - hyphen.

Would love some clarity too.

[joelanman]

just to note there is some guidance here:

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/writing-for-user-interfaces#style

but looks like HMRC have more we could consider adding