Can my heading contain a hyperlink? Does this violate usability or web accessibility principles?

Question

Is it acceptable practice to hyperlink my headings (h2 etc.)? For example:

Header X

blurb …

Header Y

blurb …

Does this violate usability principles? How about web accessibility/WCAG principles? I could not find a concrete answer to this.

Answer 1

I think it actually makes quite a lot of sense. Here are some cases, were I think this would be usefull:

• The Title of your side is a heading (e.g. name of the company, should maybe even be the topmost h1). This would be similar to the Logo of your side, and it’s usually convention to link this to the homepage/main url of your site
• You have a list of posts/blog posts/items. Each of them would have a heading and most users would expect this heading to link to the actual page for that post/item

A Link can be included in any element, so putting it inside a heading is fine. From a usability stand point, it would be weird, to just link part of the heading. If the heading has a link, the whole heading should be a link.

Do this:

This is the name of the post

Not this:

This is the name of the post