Lately, we had a number of clients who suffered from an issue on SharePoint 2013, where they lost the ability to rename a site title from its default of “Home”, to a title of their choosing.

This blog outlines how you can change the Home title using SharePoint Designer to modify the default.aspx.

Scenarios

1. You try to rename the site title of the home page of a BrightWork site collection or Team site. Your changes are ignored and the title remains “Home”.
2. You try to rename the site title of a site somewhere in the hierarchy. Your changes are ignored and the title remains “Home”. 

Root Cause

First, check you have the necessary permission. You must have Administrator permission for the project site.

If you have the permissions, then this issue is because the page title is hidden by default in the default.aspx page in SharePoint 2013, and the “Home” in the default.aspx page is not the page title of the page.

Solution

1. If you haven’t already, download and install SharePoint Designer 2013.
2. Open the problem site in SharePoint Designer 2013 (SPD)
3. Choose All Files option on the left-hand quick launch 
4. Click on default.aspx to open the file in SPD. You should be able to see some of the underlying code of the file.
5. On the Home tab, switch to Advanced Mode. 
6. Search for “PlaceHolderPageImage” … it’s near the top 
7. Paste the following on the next line (or after the closing </asp:Content> tag)

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderId=”PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea” runat=”server”>

      <label class=””>

      <SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property=”Title” runat=”server”/></label>

</asp:Content>

7. Save and refresh your page

Resources

We reproduced this originally in a team site and brought it to Microsoft’s attention on TechNet. Read more here.

Originally posted 2 April 2014. Updated to include images.