Technical
How to fix a missing character encoding
These pages do not declare a character set, so the browser guesses. When it guesses wrong, accented characters and quotation marks come out as garbage.
What it is, and what it costs
The charset tells the browser how to decode the page's text. Without it, a wrong guess produces mojibake (
café becomes café), which looks broken to readers and can confuse crawlers parsing the page.How to fix it
Add <meta charset="utf-8"> as the first thing in the <head>. Nearly every theme includes it; a missing one means a stripped-down or hand-built template.
How to check your site
View source and confirm <meta charset="utf-8"> near the top of the head. Garbled accents on the page are the visible symptom.
Questions people ask
- utf-8 or something else?
- utf-8, effectively always. It covers every language and is the web standard.
Does your site have this?
Check your site to confirm each page declares its encoding.
See also
- How to improve your Core Web VitalsGoogle watches how quickly your page becomes usable and how much it shifts around as it loads, and it feeds that into ranking. The more direct problem is simpler: a slow page loses readers before they see anything at all.
- How to fix a missing mobile viewport tagWithout a viewport tag, a phone draws your page at desktop width and then shrinks the whole thing to fit. Text comes out too small to read, taps land on the wrong link, and Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so this is the version that counts.
- How to make your pages mobile-friendlyThese pages fix their layout to a desktop width in pixels. On a phone that means horizontal scrolling and tiny text, and since Google ranks what it sees on mobile, it is the version that counts.
- How to fix content that only appears after JavaScriptMost of the text on these pages only appears after JavaScript runs. Search engines do render JavaScript, but later and less reliably, so content that is not in the HTML your server sends may never be indexed.