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How to Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress

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Would you like to make sure you don’t accidentally create duplicate post titles on your WordPress blog?

Having two posts with the same title can negatively affect the SEO performance of your site.

In this article, we’ll show you how to prevent duplicate post titles in WordPress.

How to Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress

Why Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress?

Your blog post title and URL play an important role in site engine optimization. Having a duplicate post title can negatively affect the SEO performance of your site.

When you save or publish a new post on your WordPress blog, the title will be automatically used when creating the URL post slug. In the case of a duplicate post title, WordPress will add a number to the end of the slug so the two posts won’t have the same URL.

The Title Is Used in the Post's URL

However, 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.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to prevent duplicate post titles in WordPress.

How to Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress

If you discover a duplicate title on a single author website, then you can simply change one of the titles and remove the number from WordPress URLs. However, this is 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 automatically advise your authors to change them.

The 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.

Notification for a Unique Title

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.

Notification for a Duplicate Title

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 tutorial helped you learn how to prevent duplicate post titles in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to speed up your WordPress website, or check out our list of common WordPress errors and how to fix them.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

15 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
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  2. Anurodh Keshari says

    Hey Author,

    Thanks for providing this information but this plugin is outdated and it’s not working do you have any other suggestion or any other plugin for this problem. I really need this…

    • WPBeginner Support says

      We do not have a recommendation at the moment but we will certainly take a look at the plugin and if there are any replacements we would recommend we will update our article.

      Admin

  3. Fredrik Hed says

    Any good suggestions for a plugin to check for duplicate content and/or duplicate posts on a WP website?

    Thanks :)

  4. Dodecha says

    But there are also problems where duplicate contents are developed from category and tags pages what to do about that ?

  5. Gaz says

    last comment is over a year old, but WPB have relisted this in a post dated december 2016.

    is this plugin still worthy of a mention when it is untested with the latest release of WP?

    • Gaz says

      sorry, thought the last comment was the last post at the bottom,

      Still curious to weather this plugin is being updated to be compatible with the new release of WP

  6. Webperts says

    In one of my website, I was not using SEO plugin but I was facing duplicate title, I just customized wp_title() function in header and its done.

  7. kozmikcharlie says

    for my wordpress 4.0 installation doesn’t go… :( when I write the duplicated title I need to save it to get the message (as in last pic). It seems to ignore it…

  8. KonaGirl says

    This is good to know. I had created a duplicate-2 page on purpose not realizing the detriment it would cause. I changed it and installed the plugin so that I don’t do it again unwittingly. Thanks for the info.

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