Technical

Charset declaration

Checks if the charset (UTF-8) is correctly declared.

Why does this matter?

Without a charset declaration, browsers can misinterpret characters, leading to "mojibake" (garbled characters). This is especially a problem with special characters and non-Latin scripts.

How to fix it?

Add <meta charset="UTF-8"> as the first element in <head>, before the title tag. Also make sure your server sends Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 in response headers.

This check scores from 0 to 100. Below 50 is a fail, 50 to 89 is a warning, 90 or above is good. After each crawl you see the score per page in your report, with a short note on what we found.

Frequently asked questions

Checks if the charset (UTF-8) is correctly declared.

Without a charset declaration, browsers can misinterpret characters, leading to "mojibake" (garbled characters). This is especially a problem with special characters and non-Latin scripts.

Add <meta charset="UTF-8"> as the first element in <head>, before the title tag. Also make sure your server sends Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 in response headers.

Example

Copy the code below and adapt the domain name, brand name and content to your situation.

<head><meta charset="UTF-8"><title>Page</title></head>
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