I audited my own portfolio and found a site with no title tag

I sell technical SEO. So before putting my portfolio on a new website, I did the obvious thing and audited it.

Ten client sites. Most were fine. One had a title tag that read, in full: amukitchens.com.

Not “Amu Kitchen | Afghan Restaurant in Washington DC”. Just the domain. The thing a search engine shows as the clickable headline, and it was the URL. No meta description either. No schema, on a restaurant, which is roughly like opening a shop and declining to put up a sign.

I built that site. Here is the whole audit, including the parts that embarrass me.

What I actually checked

Four things, because these are the four that are cheap to get right and expensive to get wrong:

• Title tag. The clickable headline in search results, and the single strongest on-page signal you control.
• Meta description. Not a ranking factor, but it is your ad copy. Leave it blank and Google writes it for you from whatever text it finds first.
• og:image. Decides whether a shared link looks like a business or like a broken grey box.
• Structured data. How you tell a search engine what kind of thing the page is. A restaurant without it is invisible to a lot of local search surfaces.

I pulled the raw HTML for each site rather than trusting a plugin dashboard, because the dashboard tells you what it thinks it did, not what actually shipped.

The results, unedited

Site	Title	Description	og:image	Schema
koredesignbuild.com	Clean	Clean	Yes	Yes
beamishconstruction.com	Clean	Clean	Yes	Yes
seamanbuilders.com	Starts with “Homepage”	Clean	Yes	Yes
ellwoodrobinson.com	Starts with “homepage”	Clean	Yes	Yes
evosportsqatar.com	Starts with “Homepage”	Clean	Yes	Yes
movenpro.vercel.app	Clean	Clean	Missing	Missing
best-black-limo.vercel.app	Clean	Clean	Missing	Missing
solid-signs.com	Clean	Missing	Missing	Missing
3n2solution.com	Not in served HTML	Missing	Missing	Missing
amukitchens.com	Just the domain	Missing	Missing	Missing

The bad one

Amu Kitchen is an Afghan restaurant in Washington DC. I designed it in Figma and built it on Sage 10, with a full menu system and their POS wired in for online ordering. It is a good site. It also shipped with no SEO metadata whatsoever.

Here is how it happens, and it is stupider than you would hope. WordPress falls back to the site name when no title is set. The site name field had been left as the domain during setup. Nobody set it, nobody noticed, and the site went live looking correct in every way a client would check.

Nothing was broken. That is precisely why it survived. Broken things get reported; absent things do not.

The subtle one

Three sites started their title tag with the word “Homepage”.

This one is almost always the CMS. The page is literally called “Homepage” in the admin, an SEO plugin templates the title as %title% - %sitename%, and out comes “Homepage – Ellwood Robinson Inc”. Everyone involved did something reasonable and the output is still wrong.

The one that surprised me

3N2 Solutions is a Next.js app, not WordPress. Its title and description are not in the HTML the server sends. Google renders JavaScript and will usually get there eventually, but “usually” and “eventually” are doing a lot of work in that sentence, and every other crawler that matters is less patient.

I had assumed the framework handled it. The framework does handle it, if you configure it, which I had not.

What was actually fine

Kore Design+Build came out clean on all four, which was a relief since I run their SEO. It is also the fastest site in the portfolio.

The difference between Kore and Amu Kitchen is not skill or budget. It is that Kore has an ongoing relationship where someone is paid to keep looking. Amu Kitchen was a build, a handover, and then silence.

The real lesson, which is not about title tags

Every one of these failures happened in the gap between “the developer finished” and “someone owns this site.”

A build has a definite end. SEO does not. When a project wraps, the developer stops looking and the client assumes it was handled, because it looked handled. Nobody is lying. The work just falls into a gap nobody agreed to own.

I have changed two things in how I work as a result. Metadata is now on my launch checklist as a hard gate rather than an assumption, and I re-check every site I have built once a quarter. It takes about twenty minutes for the whole portfolio.

The twenty-minute version

If you want to do this for your own sites, do not install anything. Open the page, view source, and search for four strings:

• <title> · is it a sentence a human would click, or is it your domain?
• name="description" · present, and under about 155 characters?
• og:image · present, and an absolute URL?
• application/ld+json · present, and the right type for the page?

Four searches per page. Ten sites took me twenty minutes and found two genuine problems and three wasted title tags.

Amu Kitchen is being fixed. It should have been fixed in 2023, and the only reason it was not is that nobody looked.