Google Says No Need to Change Order of Heading Tags

The question came up in today’s Google webmaster workplace hours with John Mueller regarding whether or not there are any ranking problems with pages that utilize h tags in such some way that the tag won't precede other tags.

Here is what John said:

"It doesn’t really matter.  We use the headings to understand the context of the content on the page a little bit better and for that, we don’t need like a strict order of the heading tags.

Sometimes you have multiple h1, sometimes you have, I don’t know, the order is slightly different because of your template or something on your page and that’s perfectly fine."

So if you've got misordered  H tags on a page, there's no real reason to form any changes, as long as you make sure the most vital header is residing among the H1 tags on the page.