mkdocs-meta-descriptions-plugin

mkdocs-meta-descriptions-plugin

Use this MkDocs plugin to automatically generate meta descriptions for your pages using the first paragraph of each page. This is useful if you start each page with a short introduction or summary that can be reused as the meta description.

For each page, the plugin:

1. Checks that the page doesn't already have a meta description.

   The plugin doesn't change any meta descriptions defined explicitly on the page meta-data.

2. Tries to find the first paragraph above any <h2> to <h6> headings.

   The plugin only searches for the first paragraph until the start of the first section to ensure that the content is from the "introductory" part of the page.

3. Sets the meta description of the page to the plain text context of the paragraph, stripped of HTML tags.

If the page doesn't have a meta description defined manually by you nor automatically by the plugin, MkDocs sets the meta description of the page to the value of your site_description as a fallback.

Setting up and using the plugin

⚠️ Important: to use this plugin, you must either customize your existing theme to include the value of page.meta.description in the HTML element <meta name="description" content="...">, or use an MkDocs theme that already does this by default. I recommend using the excellent Material theme.

To set up and use the plugin:

1. Install the plugin using pip:

   pip install mkdocs-meta-descriptions-plugin
   

   Depending on your project, you may also need to add the plugin as a dependency on your requirements.txt file.

2. Activate the plugin in your mkdocs.yml:

   plugins:
     - search
     - meta-descriptions
   

   Note: If you have no plugins entry in your mkdocs.yml file yet, you'll likely also want to add the search plugin. MkDocs enables it by default if there is no plugins entry set, but now you have to enable it explicitly.

Configuring the plugin

Use the following options to configure the behavior of the plugin:

plugins:
  - meta-descriptions:
      export_csv: false
      quiet: false
      enable_checks: false
      min_length: 50
      max_length: 160
      trim: false

export_csv

If true, the plugin exports the meta descriptions of all Markdown pages to the CSV file <site_dir>/meta-descriptions.csv. The default is false.

This is useful to review and keep track of all the meta descriptions for your pages, especially if you're maintaining a big site.

quiet

If true, the plugin logs messages of level INFO using the level DEBUG instead. The default is false.

Enable this option to have a cleaner MkDocs console output. You can still see all logs by running MkDocs with the --verbose flag.

enable_checks

If true, the plugin outputs a warning for each page that will have an empty or default meta description, as well as for each meta description shorter than min_length or longer than max_length. The default is false.

Enable this option if you want to make sure that all pages have a meta description and that each meta description follows general SEO best practices.

min_length

Minimum number of characters that each meta description should have. The default is 50 characters, based on these general recommendations.

Make sure that you set enable_checks: true for this option to have an effect.

max_length

Maximum number of characters that each meta description should have. The default is 160 characters, based on these general recommendations.

Make sure that you set enable_checks: true or trim: true for this option to have an effect.

trim

If true, the plugin trims meta descriptions coming from the first paragraph of the pages to include at most max_length characters.

Note that this option doesn't change any meta descriptions defined explicitly on the page meta-data.

See also

Read more about using MkDocs plugins.