The <meta name="description">
element provides a summary of a page's content
that search engines include in search results. A high-quality, unique meta
description makes your page appear more relevant and can increase your search
traffic.
How the Lighthouse meta description audit fails
Lighthouse flags pages without a meta description:
The audit fails if:
- Your page doesn't have a
<meta name=description>
element. - The
content
attribute of the<meta name=description>
element is empty.
Lighthouse doesn't evaluate the quality of your description.
How to add a meta description
Add a <meta name=description>
element to the <head>
of each of your pages:
<meta name="description" content="Put your description here.">
If appropriate, include clearly tagged facts in the descriptions. For example:
<meta name="description" content="Author: A.N. Author,
Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99,
Length: 784 pages">
Meta description best practices
- Use a unique description for each page.
- Make descriptions clear and concise. Avoid vague descriptions like "Home."
- Avoid keyword stuffing. It doesn't help users, and search engines may mark the page as spam.
- Descriptions don't have to be complete sentences; they can contain structured data.
Here are examples of good and bad descriptions:
<meta name="description" content="A donut recipe.">
<meta name="description" content="Mary's simple recipe for maple bacon donuts makes a sticky, sweet treat with just a hint of salt that you'll keep coming back for.">
See Google's Create good titles and snippets in Search Results page for more tips.