HTML & encoding
The page and the server declare different encodings
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Google's own documentation
What is wrong
Your web pages are declaring their character encoding in two different places, and those declarations do not match. Character encoding tells the browser how to display letters, numbers and symbols—for instance, whether "é" displays correctly or as garbled text. The page's HTML meta tag says one encoding (usually UTF-8), whilst the server's HTTP header says another (often ISO-8859-1). The browser will follow one and ignore the other, but it cannot be sure which.
Why it costs you
When encodings mismatch, browsers may render text incorrectly, displaying special characters as question marks or boxes. This confuses visitors and can make your content look broken or unprofessional, particularly if your site uses accented letters, currency symbols, or non-Latin scripts. Search engines also use encoding information to index your pages correctly—a mismatch can lead to indexing errors.
How to fix it
Pick one encoding and use it everywhere. UTF-8 is the modern standard and works across all browsers and languages. In your page template's HTML head, add or confirm this meta tag: `<meta charset="UTF-8">`. Then ask your hosting provider or check your server configuration (usually in `.htaccess` for Apache servers or the web server settings) to ensure the HTTP Content-Type header also declares `charset=UTF-8`. Both must match and both must say UTF-8.
What the audit tests
- The encoding in the page's meta tag matches the server's Content-Type header
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