After I set the title, it over-wrote all the titles for the individual pages

Question

A few days ago I set the title tag for my home page by doing this:

Settings => General

but it turned out that this didn't just change the title of the home page. It actually changed the title of every page on the site to that one title.

What is the way for me to correctly set the title for the home page, and not over-write the titles for all the individual pages?

EDIT:

To explain things further. I set the title tag to be this:

<title>0xdata - Open source software engineering developer community and events</title>

But now the individual pages have titles like this:

Title - Open source software engineering developer community and events » Open source software engineering developer community and events

Thank you!

Answer 1

WordPress sets the titles of your pages using tags which is normally set int he header.php file of your theme. In my themes I use:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Find your themes header.php and try changing the code inside the tags to the code above.

Answer 2

The Site Title is what you set in Settings => General. Usually, a theme will append the page's title at the end of that string. For example

My Website Blog | About Me

In order to achieve that, you'd need to utilize wp_title(). You could, alternatively, use an SEO plugin to automate this if you are not comfortable playing around with code.

I recommend WordPress SEO Plugin • Search Engine Optimization Plugin • Yoast. It can make the necessary changes for you and give you some nice options for templating your titles.

Let me know if this helps.

Answer 3

This elaborative <title> tag will let you understand what and how exactly <title> tag works in WordPress.

<title><?php
    if ( is_single() ) { single_post_title(); }       
    elseif ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) { bloginfo('name'); print ' | '; bloginfo('description'); get_page_number(); }
    elseif ( is_page() ) { single_post_title(''); }
    elseif ( is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); print ' | Search results for ' . esc_html($s); get_page_number(); }
    elseif ( is_404() ) { bloginfo('name'); print ' | Not Found'; }
    else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title('|'); get_page_number(); }
?></title>

Thanks to Ian Stewart for this nice bunch of codes.

Explanation: is_single() means the post detail page, is_page() means the page detail page (i.e. web pages), is_search() means the search result page, and the is_404(), is_home(), is_front_page() are self-explanatory. And a bar (|) is used as separator between two different texts.

So you can see that, using these bunch of codes, it won't show the site title into the inner web pages, because, you set if ( is_page() ) { single_post_title(''); }, it will show only the page title.

Though this is not a smart way to implement the <title> of a WordPress site, but it's a nice one to understand the core of the <title> tag. And the sweetest part of it that, you can use this bunch of codes into your theme header.php's <title> tag.