HTML & encoding
No character encoding declared
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 pages don't tell browsers what character set to use when displaying text. A character set is the instruction for how to render letters, numbers and symbols—without it, special characters and accented text may display as gibberish or question marks.
Why it costs you
When a browser cannot read your character encoding, visitors see broken text that makes your site look broken or unprofessional. Search engines may also struggle to understand your content properly, which affects how accurately they can index what your pages are about.
How to fix it
Add a charset declaration to your page template by including `<meta charset="utf-8">` in the `<head>` section of your HTML. Place it within the first 8 bytes of the page, before any other content. This single edit in your template will fix the issue across all pages that use it. If you use a content management system, check its settings for a character encoding or charset option, which may handle this automatically.
What the audit tests
- The character encoding is declared, in the page's meta tag or the server header
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