There might be a situation when you have a custom WordPress theme or just a custom header and want to remove the WordPress blog title and or the description. There are several right ways to do this and one very very wrong way.
Wrong Way to Remove Blog Title and Description
First, let’s start with the wrong way and that is to just remove the Blog Title and Tagline (description) from within the General Settings menu. Doing that will have your main blog page without a title for the search engines to see. So if the search engines can’t see your site or blogs title it really doesn’t matter what it looks like because not too many other people will be seeing it! The easiest to check this is to look at your web browser title bar (the very top) while on your main blog page and see what if anything is shown in it.
Right Way to Remove Title and Description
The correct way is to keep the Blog Title and Tagline in place and just tell your WordPress theme not to display them. First, you need to look at the theme’s header file to see how it is calling for, and what it is calling the title and description. In the WordPress dashboard go to Appearance, Editor. Then on the right click the header.php file. There should be two bits of code in the header file that display the title and description, and those are, or should be:
https://gist.github.com/wpcount/bc8a9c72b579ad84d3c00f260638b623#file-header-php
Those two bits of code should be very common to almost all WordPress themes, but if yours doesn’t have it, don’t worry, just ask me in the below comments and i will sort it out for you. Next, we need to see what the header file is calling for from the stylesheet, known as the style.css file. In the sample below we can see that the class blog title and description are what we need to look for in the style.css file. Please keep in mind that your themes style.css file will probably call these something different. If they were uniform in all WordPress themes I wouldn’t need to show you this step!
https://gist.github.com/wpcount/bc8a9c72b579ad84d3c00f260638b623#file-gistfile1-txt
So now we know to look for the class blog title and description in the style.css file. So on the right click the style.css file to open it in the editor. I suggest that you copy all the text in there, or any file you are attempting to edit, and paste it into a text file safe on your computer. You have been warned! All we need to do is tell the theme’s style.css not to display the title by adding the display:none command to the stylesheet. Below shows the code added to the style.css file telling it not to show. Again keep in mind that your specific theme’s code will look different than what is shown below! All you want to add is the last line display:none;
https://gist.github.com/wpcount/bc8a9c72b579ad84d3c00f260638b623#file-style-css
Next shown below is the description code for the specific theme. Again just as the title, all we need to do is add the code display:none; to the stylesheet.
https://gist.github.com/wpcount/bc8a9c72b579ad84d3c00f260638b623#file-style2-css
Now your blog’s title and description will not be visible to your visitors but will still be visible to the search engines and should show on the browser title bar. I can’t stress enough to make a backup copy of each file you are attempting to edit.
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