Meta Title not being indexed by Google?

Google is not correctly indexing my homepage Meta Title.

It displays just fine when you check the source code of the homepage, but when I see the SERPs it should something else: only the site name (Joomla website).

Any ideas why is that?

This happened to me as well, and I would also like to know the reason.

I've had the same issue - there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes Google decides another phrase on the page is more relevant to the search query. There's an article on Authority Labs where they analysed 110,000 search results and discovered Google completely of slightly changed the <title> tags on 56% of them. Google "authority labs blog title tags" - its the first result.

I encountered this recently. I have a page created on Angular 7 (so it's full of Javascript) and it took almost a month for the title tag to appear in SERP. According to Google, "Rendering JavaScript-powered web pages takes processing power and memory, and Googlebot does not have infinite resources. When a page has JavaScript in it, the rendering is deferred until Googlebot has the resources ready to render the client-side content." I recommend to also check if your site follows Google's recommendations strictly to avoid issues like this.

As others have mentioned sometimes Google shows what it algorithmically thinks is a better title than the one you put in. I've had some of my sites show a different title because I over-optimized the anchor text in my internal linking.

For example, say your page title is "The Best 10 Toothbrushes Ever." But you link to that page in the footer with the anchor text "best toothbrush" ... not uncommon for Google to choose "best toothbrush" to show in the SERP (which might not convert as well because it's more robotic-sounding).