The short version: No, don’t italicise your blog post titles. Blog posts get quotation marks, not italics, because that’s the rule for short works sitting inside a larger collection, and your blog is the larger collection. I’ve been formatting content professionally for over a decade and I still see people get this wrong on their own sites.
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I got asked this by a client last month who’d hired a freelance writer to produce twenty blog posts for her site. Every single title came back italicised. She wasn’t sure if it was wrong or just a style choice, so she asked me before publishing any of them. It took me two minutes to fix, but it made me realise how many people are quietly confused about this and just guessing.
The rule, in one sentence
Italics are for whole, standalone works. Quotation marks are for parts of a whole. A book gets italics. A chapter of that book gets quotation marks. A website or blog (as a complete entity) gets italics. A blog post (as one piece within that blog) gets quotation marks.
So technically, if you’re following Chicago Manual of Style or AP style, a blog post title should look like this: “Should You Italicise Your Blog Post Titles?” not Should You Italicise Your Blog Post Titles?
That’s the grammatically correct answer. But here’s where it gets more useful than a style guide.
Nobody uses quotation marks on blog titles either
Here’s the uncomfortable bit that most style guides won’t tell you straight: almost no professional blog on the internet uses quotation marks around post titles in the actual published headline. Not HubSpot. Not Neil Patel. Not the Harvard Business Review blog. Look at any of them and the H1 sits there completely bare, no italics, no quotes, just the words in a larger font. The formal grammar rule and the actual practice of the entire content marketing industry have quietly diverged, and everyone just went along with it.
Why? Because on a webpage, the title is already visually distinct. It’s bigger, it’s bolder, it’s usually a different colour or font weight, and it sits at the top of the page in its own space. The visual hierarchy of a webpage does the job that punctuation used to do in printed text. When you’re writing a novel and you mention a magazine article inside a paragraph, quotation marks tell the reader “this bit is a title, not part of my sentence.” A blog’s H1 tag doesn’t need that signal because the whole page structure already screams “this is the title.”
So the honest answer has two layers. Formally, blog posts take quotation marks when referenced in running text. Practically, on the actual page itself, you use neither, and that’s completely standard.
Where the rule matters: when you mention a blog post inside another piece of writing
This is the bit people miss. You don’t need to decide anything for the H1 on your own site, because convention has already decided it for you: no punctuation, just the text. Where the italics-versus-quotes question comes up is when you’re referencing someone else’s post, or your own older post, inside a new piece of writing.
Say you’re writing a roundup post and you want to reference five blog posts from other sites. In your body copy, you’d write something like:
- In her post “Five Ways to Fix a Broken Email List,” Ann Handley makes a point I still think about.
- Not: In her post Five Ways to Fix a Broken Email List, Ann Handley makes a point I still think about.
The quotation marks version is the grammatically defensible one. If you’re writing for a publication with an actual style guide (and most serious ones have one), this is the version they’ll want. If you’re writing casually on your own blog and nobody’s checking, it won’t matter to 99% of readers, but it will matter to the 1% who notice, and that 1% often includes editors, journalists, and other writers who might link to you, quote you, or hire you.
Where this gets confused with other content types
I’ve written about this exact question for other formats because the confusion isn’t limited to blog posts. If you run email marketing campaigns, you’ll eventually wonder the same thing about your subject lines, and I’ve laid out that answer separately in a piece on whether newsletter titles should be italicised, because email has its own quirks around plain text versus HTML rendering. Podcasts follow a slightly different logic too, which I cover in my rule for podcast titles, since a podcast episode behaves more like a TV episode than a blog post. And if you run webinars as part of your content mix, the same question pops up there, which I answered directly in a post on whether webinar titles need italics. The short version across all of them: the whole-versus-part rule holds, but every format has its own visual conventions layered on top, and those conventions usually win.
A five-step way to decide, if you’re still unsure
- Are you writing the H1 or headline for the actual page? Use plain text. No italics, no quotes. This covers 90% of your day-to-day writing.
- Are you mentioning a blog post title inside a paragraph of running text, on your own site or someone else’s? Use quotation marks. “Like this.”
- Are you mentioning the name of the blog itself (the whole publication), not one post on it? Use italics. Something like TechCrunch or Copyblogger.
- Are you following a specific publication’s house style? Check their style guide before you do anything else, because some outlets (particularly ones with British newspaper roots) use single quotes instead of double, and some skip punctuation for titles entirely in favour of bold text.
- Are you just publishing on your own WordPress site with no editor breathing down your neck? Pick one method and stay consistent across every post. Consistency reads as more professional than technical correctness,.
That last point is the one I’d push hardest on. I’ve audited content for clients where half the blog posts had italicised titles in the meta description, a quarter had quotation marks, and a quarter had nothing. Readers might not consciously notice, but it reads as sloppy at a level people feel even if they can’t name it. Pick a lane.
Why this matters for SEO, not just style
Here’s the bit that turns this from a grammar nitpick into something with real business consequences: italic tags inside your title tag or H1 can occasionally interfere with how search engines and social platforms parse your title. I’ve seen cases where an italicised H1 (wrapped in an em tag) rendered inconsistently when a post was shared to LinkedIn, showing the raw HTML tag briefly in the preview before the platform caught up. It’s rare, it’s a minor rendering bug, but it’s one more reason to keep your actual page titles as plain text and save any styling for emphasis within the body copy, not the headline itself.
There’s also a readability angle. Italic text is measurably harder to read at length and in headline sizes, particularly for anyone using a screen reader or anyone with dyslexia, because italic fonts distort letter shapes that many readers rely on for quick recognition. A whole italicised headline forces every visitor to work slightly harder to parse it, for zero visual or grammatical benefit. That’s a bad trade every single time.
What I do on my own site
Every post on my site has a plain-text H1, no punctuation, no italics. When I reference another post of mine inside a new article, like I’m doing right now, I use a hyperlink with the anchor text acting as the natural stand-in for quotation marks, since the underline and colour change already signal “this is a title, this is a reference.” That’s honestly become the modern replacement for both italics and quotation marks online: the hyperlink itself does the signalling job that punctuation used to do in print. If you’re not linking to the post you’re referencing, then fall back to quotation marks in running text and keep italics reserved for the name of the publication as a whole.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because writers who cover this topic tend to dodge it: this rule doesn’t matter as much as people worry it does. I’ve published hundreds of posts, been featured in Forbes, and built a career on content, and not one client, editor, or reader has ever emailed me about a misplaced italic on a blog title. The people asking this question are almost always perfectionist writers stalling on the actual writing by polishing a formatting detail that costs them zero traffic and zero credibility either way. Get it right because it’s tidy and it takes ten seconds to learn, not because it’s going to change your open rates or your rankings.
Related reading: how long should i wait to unarchive a post on instagram.
Frequently asked questions
Should blog post titles be italicised or in quotation marks?
Formally, blog post titles take quotation marks when mentioned in running text, following the same rule as magazine articles or book chapters. On the actual blog page itself, the H1 headline needs neither italics nor quotes because the page’s visual design already marks it as the title.
Do I need to italicise the name of my blog, or just individual posts?
Italicise the name of the blog as a whole publication, similar to how you’d italicise a newspaper or magazine name. Individual posts within that blog get quotation marks when referenced in text, not italics.
Does italicising a blog title affect SEO?
Not directly, but wrapping your H1 or title tag in italic HTML tags can occasionally cause inconsistent rendering when the post is shared to social platforms, and italic text is harder to read quickly, so plain text titles are the safer, cleaner choice.
What style guide should I follow for blog titles?
Chicago Manual of Style and AP Style both agree that blog posts function like articles, meaning quotation marks in text, while the blog itself is italicised like a publication. If you write for a specific outlet, check their house style guide first since some deviate from this default.
