How to Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress

Your blog post title and URL play an important role in SEO. Having a duplicate post title can negatively the affect SEO performance of your site. WordPress deals with duplicate post titles by adding a number at the end of URL slug. However these titles are still duplicate, and you should try to avoid them. In this article, we will show you how to prevent duplicate post titles in WordPress.

How WordPress Handles Duplicate Post Titles

WordPress automatically uses the post title as URL slug.

In case of a duplicate post title, WordPress tries to distinguish the title by adding a number at the end of the URL slug.

Since both post titles are still using the same keywords, this could confuse search engines when deciding which post should be ranked for the keywords used in the title.

Avoiding Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress

If you are running a single author website, then you can easily avoid this by simply changing the title and removing the number from WordPress URLs. However, it’s a lot harder to keep track of when you are running a multi-author WordPress site.

But don’t worry, the solution we’re going to cover is going to help you prevent duplicate post titles and advise your authors to change them.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Unique Title Checker plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

The plugin works out of the box, and there are no settings for you to configure.

Simply go to Posts » Add New and enter a unique post title. The plugin will check the post title and notify you that it is unique, and you are good to go.

You can now try again by creating another new post. This time use a title that you have already used for another post.

The plugin will notify you that this title is already been used.

It will not stop you from editing the post, saving it, or even publishing it.

However, the warning will let you and other authors on your website know that they should use an alternate title.

We hope this article helped you prevent duplicate post titles in WordPress. You may also want to see our step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners.

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