How to Add Subtitle for Posts and Pages in WordPress (Step by Step)

Subtitles are that small text that appears right after your main headline. After blogging for years, we’ve found this to be a helpful element for encouraging users to dive deeper into our content.

A well-crafted subtitle can provide that extra context or intrigue that turns a casual browser into an engaged reader. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have a default subtitle block (even though we think it should).

Thankfully, we’ve found an easy way to add subtitles to your WordPress posts and pages, and we’re going to show you how in this guide.

Why Add Subtitles to Posts and Pages in WordPress?

Subtitles, or secondary titles, allow you to show more information about your blog posts, which encourages visitors to read more.

Many popular blogs use subtitles in this way, including Medium, Buzzfeed, Mashable, Brain Pickings, and more.

Subtitles give you a chance to explain your title and tell readers what they will get from reading your WordPress blog post.

They will also encourage visitors to stay on your site for longer and read more content, which can increase pageviews and reduce the bounce rate. This sends positive signals to the search engines, so it may even improve your WordPress SEO.

With that said, let’s show you how to easily add subtitles to your WordPress posts and pages.

How to Add Subtitles to WordPress Posts and Pages

The easiest way to add subtitles to your WordPress website is by using Secondary Titles.

This plugin lets you easily add subtitles to your posts and pages and then customize how those subtitles look.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Secondary Titles plugin. For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Settings » Secondary Title, where you can configure the plugin’s settings.

Secondary Title can automatically show the subtitle for each page or post by merging it with the standard title. Another option is to show the subtitle for specific pages and posts only.

Since it’s the easiest option, let’s start by automatically showing a subtitle for all pages and posts. In the ‘Auto show’ section, simply select ‘On.’

After that, you can change how the subtitle looks. By default, Secondary Title will show the main headline and subtitle separated by a colon, like this:

The Secondary Title:The Post Title 

To change this, simply edit the HTML in the ‘Title format’ box.

For example, you might make the subtitle smaller. In this case, you could use H1 heading tags for the title, and a lower heading tag like H2 or H3 for the subtitle.

You can also change its color, and remove or replace the colon with any other symbol you want to use.

The ‘Preview’ will update automatically as you make changes, so you can try different settings to see what looks the best on your WordPress blog.

After that, you can control where the subtitles appear in the ‘Display Rules’ section.

First, we will select ‘On’ in the ‘Only show in main post’ section, as this means the subtitles will only appear if they are in the main blog roll.

In the ‘Post types’ section, you can choose the post types where you want to show subtitles.

To display subtitles on both posts and pages, simply check both boxes.

Next, you can choose the post categories where you want to allow subtitles.

In the ‘Categories’ section, simply check or uncheck the different post categories.

Do you want to show subtitles for specific posts only?

Then, simply type their IDs into the ‘Post ID’ box. For step-by-step instructions on how to find this information, see our guide on how to find IDs in WordPress.

In the final ‘Miscellaneous Settings’ box, you can allow visitors to search for posts using their subtitles by selecting the ‘On’ radio button.

Depending on your site, this may be a good way to improve WordPress search.

Finally, you can change whether the subtitle appears to the left or right of the primary title using the ‘Column position’ settings.

When you are happy with how the subtitle is set up, just click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

With that done, you are ready to create your first subtitle by opening a post or page.

Here, simply type your subtitle into the ‘Secondary Title’ box in the right-hand menu. Then, click ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ to make your changes live.

Now, visitors will see the subtitle when they view your post.

Manually Displaying Subtitles on WordPress Posts and Pages

You can also add subtitles to your posts and pages manually. This gives you more control over where your subtitles appear on the individual posts and pages.

To do this, simply go to Settings » Secondary Title. Then, select the ‘Off’ option in the ‘Auto show’ section.

One way to do this is using shortcodes to display the secondary title. This will allow you to display secondary titles on specific pages and posts only.

This is the shortcode that the plugin provided:

[secondary_title]

For more information on shortcodes, check out our guide on how to add shortcodes in WordPress.

You can also manually show secondary titles in your WordPress theme by adding code to your theme template files.

If you want to do this, then we recommend using WPCode. This code snippet plugin makes it safe and easy to add code to your website files without directly tweaking them.

First, you need to install the plugin on your WordPress website. Then, go to Code Snippets » + Add Snippet.

On this page, select ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ and click the ‘Use snippet’ button.

After that, the plugin recommends adding the following template tag code snippet:

echo get_secondary_title();

When we tested the code, the secondary title didn’t look aligned with the post content. So, we recommend adding the div tags to the code.

This is what it should look like:

echo '<div>';
echo get_secondary_title();
echo '</div>';

If you haven’t added code before, then see our beginner’s guide to pasting snippets from the web into WordPress.

Once you do that, you can name your code snippet. It can be something like ‘Secondary Title Snippet.’

Also, change the Code Type to ‘PHP Snippet’ so that the code works properly.

After that, make sure to scroll down and leave the Insert Method as ‘Auto Insert.’

As for the Location, you can switch to the ‘Page-Specific’ tab and click your desired location. We chose ‘Insert Before Content’ so that the secondary title appears after the title and before the first paragraph of the post.

You can also refer to our WordPress template hierarchy cheat sheet to decide the best place to display the secondary title.

The cool thing about WPCode is it has a conditional logic feature. This allows you to create rules for displaying the subtitles that are more detailed than the Secondary Title plugin.

To do this, just scroll down to the ‘Smart Conditional Logic’ feature. Then, toggle on the ‘Enable Logic’ button.

You can then create rules to show or hide the subtitle. These rules can be based on various conditions like the type of visitor that’s viewing the page, the type of page itself, specific URL slugs, and more.

Once done, just make the code active and click ‘Save Snippet’ at the top. That’s it!

For more tips and tricks to manage your WordPress posts and pages, check out these guides below:

• How to Prevent Duplicate Post Titles in WordPress
• How to Show the Current Taxonomy Title, URL, & More in WordPress
• How to Hide the Title for Selective WordPress Posts and Pages
• How to Link to External Links From the Post Title in WordPress
• How to Split Post or Page Title in WordPress
• How to Create a List of Forbidden Words for WordPress Titles

We hope this article helped you learn how to add subtitles to your posts and pages in WordPress. You may also want to see our expert picks of the best related posts plugins for WordPress and our guide on how to redirect users to a random post in WordPress.

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