How to Fix the ‘Missing required hCard / hEntry’ error

Are you getting the Missing required hCard “author” or similar hEntry / microformat error in Google’s structured data testing tool (live results) or in Google Search Console (cached results)? This is an issue with your theme, not with any of our plugins.

Warning: Updating your theme may remove the changes you have made to core theme files. For that reason, we recommend contacting your theme developer to request a permanent fix to this issue.

Missing: author

To temporarily fix this issue for the author tag, please follow these steps:

Locate the call to the_author(); in your theme’s single.php file, it might look something like this:

<span class="author_name"><?php the_author(); ?></span>

Change it so that it has a class vcard author and within that another element with a class fn. The example above would become something like this:

<span class="vcard author author_name"><span class="fn"><?php the_author(); ?></span></span>

As you can see this adds quite a bit of markup, but it would prevent that error from showing. If you are unable to locate or have trouble with this code, please contact your theme developer for assistance.

Missing: updated / entry-title / other

The requested tag is not present in your theme or is incomplete. Please contact your theme developer for assistance.

Can I Turn Off hEntry In My Theme?

In some cases, you may simply want to remove hEntry completely until your theme is updated. By adding this code to your theme’s functions.php file you will remove hEntry from being inserted into your posts. This will remove the structure of hAtom which in turn removes the hEntry data.