How to Replace ‘Add Title’ Placeholder Text in WordPress

The default “Add Title” text in WordPress doesn’t do much to inspire better headlines. It’s just a placeholder, making it easy to ignore and not very helpful if you want consistent, high-quality content.

Customizing that text can give your writers a clearer idea of what you expect, whether that’s adding keywords, keeping titles short, or matching a specific style.

It’s a small change that can make your content creation process smoother and your dashboard feel more professional.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to replace the default “Add Title” placeholder in WordPress with your own custom message, step by step.

When and Why You Need to Replace Title Placeholder Text

When creating a new post on your WordPress website, the placeholder text ‘Add title’ is a helpful prompt that lets you and your authors know how to get started.

That’s true whether you use the block editor or the classic editor.

However, when you are using custom post types or creating a custom CMS for clients, it can be more useful to your users to change the text to something less generic.

Let’s say you have created a custom post type to create personal profiles, and you want the person’s name to be used as the title. By replacing the placeholder text, you can instruct users to use this field to enter the name.

Or if you have created a custom post type for a movie database, then a more helpful placeholder text might be ‘Enter movie name with release year’.

With that being said, let’s have a look at how to replace the ‘Add title’ text in WordPress.

Replacing The Title Placeholder Text in WordPress

To replace the title placeholder text in WordPress, you’ll need to add code to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file.

However, that can be dangerous because even the smallest error can break your website. That is why we recommend using WPCode.

After thorough testing, we have concluded that it is the safest and easiest way to add custom code to your website. Plus, it is super easy to use. If you want to find out more about our experience, then take a look at our WPCode review.

First, you have to install and activate the WPCode plugin. For details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, visit the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard and choose the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.

This will take you to a new screen where you have to select ‘PHP Snippet’ as your code type.

Then, add a name for the code snippet that you are about to add.

This name will only be for your identification, so we recommend choosing something concise and descriptive, like ‘Replace The Title Placeholder Text in WordPress.’

This will help you quickly find the snippet if you ever want to edit, disable, or delete it.

After that, add the following code to the ‘Code Preview’ box:

function wpb_change_title_text( $title ){
     $screen = get_current_screen();
  
     if  ( 'movie' == $screen->post_type ) {
          $title = 'Enter movie name with release year';
     }
  
     return $title;
}
  
add_filter( 'enter_title_here', 'wpb_change_title_text' );

Don’t forget to replace ‘movie’ with your own custom post type and the text ‘Enter movie name with release year’ with your custom text.

Finally, toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’ and click the ‘Save Snippet’ button to store your settings.

This code will now change the placeholder text for the custom post type ‘movie’ when using the block editor.

Notice in the screenshot above that the ‘Add title’ placeholder has been replaced with ‘Enter movie name with release year’ when creating a new Movie post type.

The best thing is that the same code snippet will also work if you are using the classic WordPress editor.

How Does This Code Snippet Work?

Let us explain the code. First, we created a function wpb_change_title_text. Inside the function, we added a check to see if the user is on a particular custom post type screen.

When it detects that a user is on that particular custom post type screen, then it will return our custom title text. After that, we simply hooked our function to the enter_title_here filter, which allows you to change the default title text.

That’s all. You can now create a new entry in your custom post type, and you will see your own custom placeholder text in the title field.

Expert Guides on Using Titles in WordPress

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to replace the ‘Enter title here’ or ‘Add title’ placeholder text in WordPress. You may also want to see some other articles related to WordPress titles:

• SEO Title vs H1 Post Title in WordPress: What’s the Difference?
• How to Properly Use Heading Tags in WordPress (H1-H6 Explained)
• How to Automatically Truncate Blog Post Titles in WordPress
• How to Split Post or Page Title in WordPress
• How to Hide the Title for Selective WordPress Posts and Pages
• How to Add Sponsored Post Prefix to Post Title in WordPress
• How to Use Headline Analyzer in WordPress to Improve SEO Titles
• How to Create a List of Forbidden Words for WordPress Titles
• How to Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress
• How to Add Subtitle for Posts and Pages in WordPress (Step by Step)

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