Low This Hint is of the lowest significance, and should only be addressed if there are not more serious issues which have not been handled. Issue This Hint represents an error or problem that needs to be fixed.

Character set is not UTF-8

URLs that specify the character set as a value other than UTF-8.

Why is this important?

The HTML5 specification advises the use of UTF-8, which can support many languages and can accommodate pages and forms in any mixture of those languages. Its use also eliminates the need for server-side logic to individually determine the character encoding for each page served or each incoming form submission, which can have an impact on load time.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any internal URL that specifies a charset, using any value other than UTF-8.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

The Hint would trigger for any URL where the meta charset is specified in the <head>, using any value other than UTF-8:

<head>
 <meta charset="UTF-32">
 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> 
 ...
 <link href="/css/base.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/> 
 <script src="/templates/main/js/modernizr.custom.99144.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
 ...
</head>

Similarly, this Hint will also trigger if the charset is specified as anything other than UTF-8 in the HTTP header.

How do you resolve this issue?

Always use UTF-8 as the encoding, and convert any content in legacy encodings to UTF-8.

Why Sitebulb?

Features

SEO Reports

Sitebulb Cloud

Learn Sitebulb

Learn SEO

Page Speed Hints

Critical

High

Medium

Low

Insight

Issue

Opportunity

Potential Issue

Low

Diagnostic