page slug displaying??  are we talking about the browser page title here?  and assume you mean the page title, not the slug (it never changes and is always the same wp page)…

you say, wp forum page has a seo page title set?  do you mean the actual wp page? if so, what seo plugin are you using since wp does not have such a beast…

what are you simple press seo settings?  forum – components – seo…  please post as screenshot of that admin panel…

So sorry. I have been under the hammer and wasn’t careful with my wording.

Yes, I mean the browser page title.

Yes, I mean the actual WP Page (called Forums)

We use Yoast SEO. The SEO title impacts on the browser title… apparently 

Forum SEO setting screenshot attached.

well, as I said, every bit of forum display is shown on that single wp page…  there are NOT multiple wp pages in the forum… the appearance of their being multiple forum pages is just url rewrite black magic…

so if you put an seo title with yoast on the forum page, you are essentially saying to use the seo title on ALL forum “pages”…  so you do not want to do that..

and also note, that in the forum seo options, you do not have the use our seo titles option checked… so we defer to other… 

for all the “pages” in the forum (again, all on that one single wp page), you really want to set up the forum seo options to what you want…

Thank you for your help.

I understand the rewrite black magic concept. Unfortunately the consequences of each choice is not always clear.

I have followed your instructions but the Browser Title is still not displaying correctly… nothing changed. Maybe I have missed some crucial thing that others take for granted that should be done.

I have removed the SEO title from the WP magic page and I have selected ALL the following Forum SEO options; I did try various combinations of selections:

So what does it display in the browser title bar and what do you want it to display?

We have come across some WP themes that appear to hard-code title bars in their header setup. Could this be what is happening in your case?

Go back to my first post and mentally change the images names to have ‘Browser Title’ instead of ‘slug’ (a sincere apology was made in my second post). 

The first image shows the Browser Title while the browser page is loading. The second image shows the Browser Title once the browser page finishes loading.

Our first preference is to have the Topic as the Broswer Title and the second preference is to have the Forum Name as the Browser Title. But, for now, we will settle for anything that doesn’t start with http://####.

The Theme is WeeklyNews and Browser Titles are working perfectly for WP Posts and WP Pages;  and appear to work perfectly for SP during loading.

it was a reasonable question since many things had changed since your original post… so understand it looks the same now…

as to your preferences, you will want to have just the topic selected then…and make sure you have overwrite enabled…

and to Andy’s question, some themes do odd things and dont let us overwrite…  is it possible to do quick temp switch to default wp theme and see if the same?

what are you wp seo options for page titles?

we know simple press works with wp seo (have it on one of my test sites now), so trying to understand…

also, can you give us a link to the site???  and check the meta title of pages in the page header…  would be interested in what it is there…  we set the both of them the same…

Hi. I understand it was a reasonable request; I wasn’t trying to be snarking was just saying nothing had changed. Sorry if I’m coming across wrong; I really do appreciate the support… questions and all.

I changed the settings as per your instructions but it’s still the same.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to switch to another theme.

SEO Pages
Title template: %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

— The same is set for Posts

Force rewrite titles is not selected.

This is the sites forum: http://www.hubhao.com/forums/

We are a new Magazine. The next issue, due out soon, is having a photo competition; we will be using the forum to manage submissions and voting from the public. As you can see, there are two Forums set up for this – the second one: Competitions, is the testing ground and will be deleted once the latest issue is available to the public.

We are having all sorts of serious ‘load time’ issues that we are trying to resolve as well… headaches all round.

If you only have the one wordpress page try removing the title template. 

If you are on shared hosting I suggest looking into vps hosting. WordPress can be quite demanding resource wise. Check out my sp forum setup https://blog.ebaymotorssucks.com it’s running under a vps box. 

no worries…

I do notice that the html header title tag is

    <title> Dongguan Hubhao</title>

on the forum page…  but for every other page, you seem to have a doubling or mismatch, for example on life hub page its

   <title>Life HUB – Dongguan Hubhao Dongguan Hubhao</title>

that seems to indicate to me that there are two things battling for the title outputting… normally, the header title tag and browse title will be same (but do not have to be)…   so your theme may very well be demanding control of the title…  its one of the most ‘battled for’ items as plugins and themes want to add their two cents…

can you  check your wp theme and see what its doing for the title tags?  typically this will be in a header.php file in the theme… but these days, they are getting more and more exotic and it can be anywhere…  it will be where the wp theme is outputting stuff in the page header…

Are you rewriting titles in yoast seo? That could cause your symptoms. I have that feature turned off. 

Also for general performance enhancements I suggest running your domain through cloudflare to take advantage of their caching. 

lol, you must be one of the few I know having good luck with cloudfare…  😉  fine for totally static content… but….

Thank you all for your advice.

I will step through the bits and pieces and see if I can sort out the battle for the Title. Now that I know what I’m gunning for it should work out. I will let you know.

As for load-time problem, thanks for the tips. I should have mentioned the battle in this regard is with the Great Firewall of China. Our site is hosted in Hong Kong and we have a personal relationship with our host provider; 100% confident that he is doing everything on his end. However, site visitors are in China… behind the great firewall.

The big problem is with WP and EVERY plugin wanting to call out to Google…. googleapis this maps.google that… every call to Google or the WP not org site causes a pause so the great firewall can check where it’s going and why and then decide if the call can go through or not… usually not.

So if any of you have a magic trick that can stop this, please do tell. So you know, the setting to not use Google Fonts is correct 

Cheers