Fix Your WordPress Site Title Refusing to Update

You might be facing an issue where your WordPress site title is not changing for your home page. No matter where you change it: in the Appearance > Customize tab, in YoastSEO, it just wouldn’t budge. You might’ve tried a lot of things, but I suggest you try this ASAP:

1. Deactivate Yoast SEO plugin
2. Go to your home page
3. Check whether the title has updated

If it did update after deactivating the Yoast plugin, the issue likely lies in the database files, caused by the Yoast plugin. There’s an outdated value in the Yoast database containing your old title that needs to be deleted or updated. Personally, I chose to delete it but I’m not sure what’s best. It’s important to note that the old title is still lying around in my database files, but it’s not in use anymore.

Requirements

I did these steps in LocalWP. If your server is ran through a hosting provider, consider trying to access the phpMyAdmin dashboard through the cPanel, otherwise create a backup with WPVivid, upload it and restore it to a LocalWP site and follow the steps from below. You can create a new backup after implementing the fix and restore the fixed site onto your original host. IMO, a restored version of your site doesn’t change anything, and should be unaffected compared to the “original” version.

Here’s how I fixed it

1. I dropped the whole SQL folder into VS Code editor.
2. Searched the old title with CTRL + Shift + F, the result came up.
3. Take note of the number at the beginning of the opening parenthesis, that’s the id you’ll need in a second.

If you’re confused, drop it into ChatGPT and ask for the ID.

4. Go to LocalWP and start your site.
5. Go to the Database pane
6. Click on Open AdminerNeo
7. Click on the link that says “SQL command” on the top left
8. A big text field should open up. Paste this in the field:

DELETE FROM wp_yoast_indexable WHERE id = 31;

In my case, my id was 31, yours might be different.

9. Click on “Execute” at the bottom left.
10. It should say “Query executed OK, 1 row affected.”
11. Go to your homepage, perform a reload and check whether the issue is gone yet. If the issue persists, try clearing cache and then reloading again.
12. If your homepage’s title is still not changing, try repeating the steps above.

I hope this fixed your WordPress site title not changing issue, if you want to read more, check out our other posts.