Proposal to change the headings hierarchy in the Support section

[afercia]

Splitting this out from #4110.

The headings hierarchy in the Support section has room for improvements for better SEO and accessibility:

As mentioned in #4112 the logo shouldn't be a h1. The main topic in this page is "WordPress Support" and that should be the only h1 in the page.

The headings hierarchy is incorrect: all the other heading should be bumped up from h3 to h2.

Categories main pages:
they look OK with the exception the logo shouldn't be a h1 see for example ​https://wordpress.org/support/category/basic-administration/

Article pages:
In the article pages, for example ​https://wordpress.org/support/article/plugins/

• the logo shouldn't be a h1
• in the left sidebar, the "Categories" h2 comes before the main topic h1, which is unexpected
• the hierarchy of the headings in the content is correct but there's a problem: the "hash link" to get the in-page link repeats the visible text. This way, all the headings have duplicated content.

In the example page, any software including search engines crawlers and assistive technologies perceive the following headings content:

• Introduction Introduction
• Plugin Repositories Plugin Repositories
• Default Plugins Default Plugins
• Plugin Development Plugin Development

Suggested:

• the headings shouldn't contain extraneous content: the "hash link" should be moved out from the headings
• ideally, it should have a meaningful link text, e.g.: "link to the section Introduction", "link to the section Plugin Repositories", etc.

Please consider the Support section has a huge amount of sub-section, pages, and content. Going through all of them is out of the scope of this ticket. However, these are general guidelines that should be applied everywhere.

[afercia]

Additionally, in the Support Forums, the headings hierarchy in the sidebar needs improvements. For example in this page ​Forum threads about Bluehost » which is also linked from the "Hosting" section, the headings "Views" and "Feeds" in the sidebar are h4 headings:

They should be changed to h2.

As said, I'm sorry I can't really catch all the cases: there are simply too many pages and different views so please consider these as general guidelines that should be applied across all the wp.org network. See also the tracking ticket #4110 for a a chrome extension that can be used as a quick tool to check the headings structure.

[dufresnesteven]

Updates heading structure for wporg-support. Does not address issues in handbook.

[mrfoxtalbot]

Since the forums page is being redesigned, I am going to cross link to #4007 to ensure this ticket is taken into account.

[adamwood]

New [Forums landing page]​https://wordpress.org/support/forums/ has valid headings. Other pages are in progress.

[adamwood]

Sidebar hierarchy updated in https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/13485, which fixes the single topic view. However many views like ​https://wordpress.org/support/view/all-topics/ have no h1, so remain broken.

[adamwood]

In 13506:

wporg-support-2024: Fix heading hierarchy

Adds h1 headings to many pages and adjusts styles

Fixes #4117