Require Meta Description

ID

html.meta_description_require

Severity

info

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

low

Resource

Best Practice

Language

Html

Tags

best_practice

Description

Flags a document whose <head> carries no <meta name="description"> with non-blank content.

Rationale

The meta description is the summary search engines and social previews show under the page title. Without it the snippet is auto-generated from arbitrary page text, which is often a poor representation of the page. A present-but-empty content is treated the same as missing.

<head>                                                  <!-- FLAW — no description -->
  <title>Hi</title>
</head>

<head>                                                  <!-- OK — non-blank description -->
  <meta name="description" content="A page">
</head>

<head>                                                  <!-- FLAW — blank content -->
  <meta name="description" content="">
</head>

Remediation

Add a meta description summarising the page in roughly 150 characters, e.g. <meta name="description" content="…​">.

References