Heading structure, explained without the jargon

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Here is heading structure without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Most of it is correctness rather than charity: use the right element and much of it happens automatically. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The short version

Headings are how many people navigate a page. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

One h1, then no skipped levels. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

A reasonable first step

Do not choose heading levels for their font size. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

In practice

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about heading structure before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Headings are how many people navigate a page — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.