A simple way to keep your Vue page title in sync with the router

#javascript #vue #beginners #webdev

I have noticed in quite a few projects that developers forget to keep page title updated with the router or maybe think that they will do it tomorrow as it is such a small feature :). It always makes sense to keep the title synchronized with the contents for several reasons:

helps users with more than one tab
important for website analytics

I will show you how to do it with the standard vue-router.

Step 1: Declare route meta in your router config

First things first, let's add some additional metadata to our standard routes:

  routes: [
    {
      path: '/',
      name: 'home',
      component: HomePage,
      meta: {
        auth: true,
        title: 'Dashboard'
      }
    }, {
      path: '/login',
      name: 'login',
      component: LoginPage,
      meta: {
        auth: false,
        title: 'Login'
      }
    }, {
      path: '/buckets',
      name: 'buckets',
      component: BucketsPage,
      meta: { auth: true, title: 'Buckets' }

More docs on the router package can be found in the official vue router website.

Step 2: Add $route watcher in your App.vue

Go to your Vue main .vue file (it should have a <router-view></router-view> component) and add a watcher:

    watch: {
      '$route' (to, from) {
        document.title = to.meta.title || 'Your Website'
      }
    },

This will set a title as your page title (if you specified a meta field for that route). I have tried to achieve the same with router navigation guards but $route watcher seemed like the simplest solution.

Looks easy, right? :) Feel free to experiment and define more fields in the router meta like page description and anything else you want to be set for that page. Then modify the watcher to also use them.

Hope this helps!

Top comments (8)

Loftie Ellis • Sep 9 '19

Updating the title is definetly something a lot of spa's seems to neglect.
In your example you should probably specify immediate:true for the watch, otherwise the title wont update on the first load

watch: {
      '$route':{
        handler: (to, from) => {
          document.title = to.meta.title || 'Your Website'
        },
         immediate: true
      }
    },

And if you start adding more metadata I would recommend looking at github.com/nuxt/vue-meta

Derek D • Sep 10 '19 • Edited

Navigation guard inside your router makes more sense structurally IMO, but each work well:

router.beforeEach((to, from, next) => {
  document.title = to.meta.title || 'Your Website Title');
  next();
});

;)

Snehanshu Phukon • Jan 18 '20

Another way is using router.afterEach

router.afterEach((to, from) => {
  if (to.meta && to.meta.title) {
    document.title = to.meta.title + ' | Any suffix';
  }
});

Alex Lab • Aug 16 '21

Hello, here is a version with the composition API:

<script lang="ts">
import { defineComponent, watch } from 'vue';
import { useRoute } from 'vue-router';

export default defineComponent({
  setup() {
    const route = useRoute();

    watch(
      () => route.meta.title,
      () => {
        document.title = route.meta.title as string;
      }
    );
  },
});
</script>

Simon Measures • Sep 10 '19

I'm wondering why you have Step 2 with the title "Add $route watcher in your App.vue" but then the tutorial text instructs us to put the watcher in main.vue. Could you please clarify this.