How to fix skipped heading levels

Headings form an outline of the page. Assistive technology lets users jump between them and infer structure from the levels, so the levels need to nest logically: an h2 introduces a section, an h3 a subsection inside it, and so on. Skipping a level (h1 straight to h3) breaks that outline. This supports WCAG 1.3.1 Info and Relationships.

• Use one h1 for the page's main title.
• Do not skip levels going down: after an h2, the next deeper heading is an h3, not an h4.
• Choose the level for structure, not size. If an h3 looks too big, change its size in CSS, do not promote it to an h2 or demote a real section to a smaller heading.
• Do not use headings for visual emphasis. For bold styled text that is not a section title, use a paragraph with CSS instead of a heading element.

In practice, fixing this is usually swapping a heading tag (for example h4 to h3) and moving any styling to a class, so the page looks identical but reads correctly.

Run the free scan above to see where heading levels skip, with the element shown. Adjust the tags, keep the styling in CSS, and re-scan. The same checks run as a browser extension and a CI gate.