NOTE: Many updates to Woothemes themes and the WordPress SEO plugin make it easy to resolve this problem. Go to the WordPress SEO plugin settings > Titles & Meta > then check the “Force Title Rewrites option.
Woothemes makes some amazing themes. It also comes with some basic SEO settings baked in. If you’re looking for something more robust that includes things like XML sitemaps, webmaster verification codes, SEO checking tools, etc… Yoast makes a great plugin called WordPress SEO. Unfortunately they don’t always play nice even if you don’t use the Woothemes SEO functionality.
The Problem
I’ve been having a problem with my titles showing double title separators. For example, the title would look like this: “Sample Post || Sample Website”. If I disabled the Yoast plugin or changed themes, the problem would go away. Woothemes does try to detect a SEO plugin’s existence, but doesn’t seem to work just right yet.
Some people have reported the following 2 things that might fix the problem (but not for me):
- I did try checking the “Force rewrite titles” box in SEO > Titles. It did make the separator only show once, but then the site name was shown twice now.
- I also tried checking the “Enable woo_title()” box in the Woothemes SEO settings, but that did nothing.
The Solution
Here’s how I fixed the problem: at the top of SEO > Titles, Yoast makes the suggestion that you need your Header.php to show the following line to work correctly:
<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>
I replaced the code below with the code from above in Header.php and bam! The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is now working correctly. WARNING: If you go this route, you must remember that any theme updates will overwrite this new code. Luckily its very simple.
thnx, seems it’s better to do it mannually, Force rewrite titles doesnt work for me
glad to help!
Thanx for discovering the solution. I haven’t check Force rewrite titles .Just change the code in header.php file.
Please i don’t know what’s wrong with my theme.. i can’t seems to get it right.. it’s annoying to see how the page get indexed wrong with double title….please help me..
Assume “title” refers to the name of the site, not the title of any post? Kind of confusing because articles (posts) have titles. Sites have names or addresses but no one says “The title of my site is blogsnewreviews.com.”
I guess you could look at it either way. Some people have double post titles and the code you are editing is the page’s title.
Hi Joost. I have a little problem with the version 1.1.5, in the titles:
– I changed my in header.php, so I am using
– I don’t check the reforce write.
– The title of my site appears double.
– I only solved this clearing the title of my site in “general settings” from wp. (But I need this field because feed appears without title, etc…).
Second option:
– I put the title in “general settings” from wordpress.
– I write %%title%% in the field of the plugin.
– The “reforce write” is unchecked.
– The title of the home appears right (only one), but in the Posts the title is “PosttitleTitle of the site”.
– If I delete the field %%title%% of the posts, the title is “Posttitle – Title of the siteTitle of the site”.
What can I do? Thanks for this plugin and thanks in advance for your help.
Best Regards,
Gerard
Well, finally I solved that writing the Title in “general settings” of the WordPress CMS, and the same Title in the field of your plugin. The code for the title must be this: , and the option “force rewrite” must be activated. Now that works right.
Have a good weekend!
I know its been two years since this post. But I been dealing with double titles for a while now and nothing worked. Until I saw your post about Yoast SEO and Force Rewrite.. I can’t add the code for some reason but all I had to do was click Force Rewrite. I am using a older Woo Theme. and I just have to thank you for your post! I been getting really sick of seeing a double titles..
This isn’t working for me. =/
This too worked for me on a client’s site. Replace the woo_title() with the default WordPress wp_title() with Forced Rewrite turned on. You should have created and installed a WooThemes Child theme to prevent over-writing during theme updates.
Awesome. Easy fix. Thank you!!
Thanks, this help fixed the problem I was having.
Worked for me. Thanks a lot.