Parts of an ONS webpage Titles

Overview

Titles tell users what our releases and webpages are about.

Writing and formatting release titles

Release titles should:

• include a concise, plain-language description of the subject
• include the geographic coverage of the data
• include a time period (edition) after the colon, which can either be the period covered by the data or the month and/or year of publication (methodology page and static page titles are excluded from this, and do not require a time period)
• be no more than 65 characters, including spaces; longer titles are cut off in search engine results
• be written in sentence case, except for the first word of the title and proper nouns
• use a comma as a second separator rather than an en dash

Release titles should not include:

• a statistical designation (such as official statistics in development); these should be in the summary
• abbreviations or acronyms unless they are well known, for example, UK, GDP or EU

Optimising release titles for users and search engines

Release titles should be frontloaded and have the most important information first. For example, avoid starting titles with “An exploration of” or “Analysis of”. This makes the topic of your content more visible to users on search result pages.

Release titles should also include words that users put into search engines rather than survey names or data sources.

Quarterly time periods in release titles

If the time period is quarterly, use the months rather than the quarter name in the release title. Some users may not be familiar with quarters or understand the periods they cover. For example, use January to March 2020 instead of Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2020.

Read more about best practice when writing titles in web and print publications in our titles and headings guidance

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