Document does not have a meta description
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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
contentattribute of the<meta name=description>element is empty.
Lighthouse doesn't evaluate the quality of your description.
Each SEO audit is weighted equally in the Lighthouse SEO Score, except for the manual Structured data is valid audit. Learn more in the Lighthouse Scoring Guide.
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:
Don't
<meta name="description" content="A donut recipe.">Too vague.
Do
<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.">Descriptive yet concise.
See Google's Create good titles and snippets in Search Results page for more tips.
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