When the Site Title Refuses to Change
At least four different things display something that looks like your site title, and Settings, General only controls one of them. Work out which one you are staring at and the fix takes a minute.
Quick fix: work out which title you are looking at. The browser tab reads the <title> tag, which an SEO plugin usually generates from its own template. The words in your header are a separate thing your theme renders, and a theme or block setting can override those independently. Change the right one and the problem disappears.
WordPress stores the site title in exactly one place: the blogname option, set in Settings, General. Almost every "it won't change" report is something downstream substituting its own value over the top of that option, and the cheapest way to find the culprit is to notice precisely where the old text survives.
Establish which title is stale
Open the site logged out, in a private window, and check three places separately:
| Where the old title still appears | What is at fault |
|---|---|
| Browser tab only | SEO plugin title template, or a theme filter on the title tag |
| Header text only | Theme header setting, or a Site Title block with static text |
| Both, everywhere, logged out only | A cache layer serving old HTML |
| Both, including in wp-admin | The option never saved |
| Search results only | Search engine has not recrawled yet |
| One language version only | Translation plugin storing a per-language title |
That single observation eliminates most of the list. A stale tab with a correct header is never a caching problem, and a correct tab with a stale header is never an SEO plugin problem.
Confirm the option actually saved
Go back to Settings, General, reload the page and read the Site Title field. If it shows the old value, the save failed rather than the display.
Common reasons a save silently fails: the session expired and the form posted as a logged-out request, a security plugin blocked the request, or a second administrator changed it back. If the field shows the new value but nothing else does, the option is fine and the problem is downstream — move on.
Check the SEO plugin's title template
If only the browser tab is wrong, this is almost certainly it. SEO plugins take over the <title> tag entirely and build it from a template such as page title, separator, site name.
Two things go wrong there. Someone types the site name into the template as literal text, in which case renaming the site changes nothing until the template is edited. Or the template is fine globally but that one page has a manual SEO title set on it, which beats the template. Check the page-level SEO fields before the global settings — they are the more common cause and the faster check.
Check the theme and block overrides
If the header text is wrong, the theme is rendering something other than the option.
- Classic themes often add their own header text field in the Customiser, sometimes labelled site title, site name or logo text. Where that field has a value, the theme uses it and ignores
blogname. - Block themes render the header through a template containing a Site Title block. That block normally binds to the option dynamically — but if someone typed replacement words directly into it, the block now holds static text. Edit the header template part, clear the typed text, and it reverts to the dynamic value. How block themes work explains why template parts behave differently from Customiser settings.
- A logo can hide the title. Many themes suppress the text title once a logo is uploaded, via a display-site-title toggle. The title has not failed to change; it is simply not being drawn. The same override logic causes a site logo that refuses to change.
- A child theme or site plugin may filter
bloginfoor the option itself. If nothing in the interface explains it, search your theme and custom code forblogname.
Rule out caching last, not first
Caching gets blamed for this constantly and is usually innocent — but if the new title appears while you are logged in and the old one appears logged out, it is the answer.
Purge the page cache for the homepage specifically, then any CDN in front of it, then reload in a private window. Do not click every purge button in sequence; identify the stale layer or the same thing recurs on the next edit. Working through the cache layers in order covers that properly, and clearing WordPress cache covers the mechanics.
Search results are the exception where waiting is correct. Once the tag is right, the listing updates on the next recrawl and nothing you do speeds that up meaningfully.
The order worth following
Look at where the old text survives, confirm the option saved, check page-level then global SEO titles, check theme and block settings, purge caches last. Five steps, cheapest first, and you will rarely need more than two of them. If your header still shows something you cannot locate in any setting, the value is coming from code — customising a WordPress theme properly covers where to look and how to override it without editing vendor files.
Frequently asked
- The browser tab reads the page's title tag, which most SEO plugins generate from their own template rather than from Settings, General. If that template contains hard-coded text instead of the site-name variable, the stored option is irrelevant.
- In a single option row named blogname in the options table, set from Settings, General. Everything else that shows a title either reads that option or substitutes its own value on top of it.
- Most themes hide the text title once a logo is set, through a display-site-title toggle in the header or Customiser settings. The option is still saved and still used elsewhere, such as in the title tag and RSS feed.