Website with clean codes

[Justin B1212]

A 2021 SEO book was talking about checking the website codes on this website https://validator.w3.org I did a check on my website and it comes up with 30 different errors in coding. Do they all need to be fixed? Many thanks.

 

[finleydesign]

Find a website without errors!!, or best still test all the big companies who just get on running their business

Change your mind set and your site will do well, create a website for your customers, not google or wc3 reports

 

[OldWelshGuy]

If a page renders correctly and everything works in current browsers, then forget W3C.

Yes bad code can slow things down but by and large, nobody writes perfect code, just as nobody writes perfect English, there are always some little errors like using a ; instead of : for instance.

The main elements to check are
1. that google has cached your entire page content (do a search on google for site:yourdomain using either the www. or whichever version you use, plus the .com or .co.uk etc this will bring up all the pages Google has for your site, then click the 'cache' link. view the page and if that is all there and working then that's stage 1 done.

2. Page speed (Google core web vitals) go here https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and check the page speed. Ideally you want all green bars, but amber is acceptable, red means a little bit of work has to be done.

 

[gpietersz]

@Justin B1212 it depends on the errors. In general fix the errors, but not all the warnings, but look at all.

Looking at your page, the unneeded type attributes are harmless. The CSS errors might change the look of your page, but if you are happy with it at all sizes its not a big problem. Mostly, again, unnecessary but harmless.

With regard to the missing alt attributes, you can often just add alt="" if its an image that could just be skipped (e.g. by blind people using screen readers) or actually useful text if not.

 

[fisicx]

@Justin B1212 - if they got that bit of advice wrong one wonders what else is incorrect.

 

[gpietersz]

@fisicx The validator is a useful tool, but it highlights possible problems, rather than giving you a list of things you have to fix. I used to use it. The easiest way is to run it locally during development, rather than needing to have a public site the w3c instance can reach.

For example, one of the CSS errors is highlights would prevent anything it applied to having the desired spacing, but as the class is not actually used.

You are right that its probably not likely to help much with SEO - the time when spiders would choke easily on bad HTML or CSS is long behind us.

 

[Larry Fong]

The W3 validator is not much to do with SEO.

 

[tan_lan]

The problem with the w3c validator is that is considers all errors to be equal.

A missing alt tag on a generic image is in a very different ball park to malformed html. Malformed html may work in most browsers, but thats not to say a search engines will parse it in the same way.

 

[antropy]

It's a good idea to fix them as often they're pretty easy to fix and they can be causing bugs that you haven't noticed.

Paul.

 

[Michael Beaumont]

Over time tags become obsolete which show up on W3C and can help with getting aria tags right. Its a great way to understand how your page code works. Its not a priority task but something to keep an eye on and fix when you can.

 

[fisicx]

Its a great way to understand how your page code works.

How?

 

[HostXNow]

Try to fix any issues to help speed up the website. You may also run the website through a free speed test site like https://gtmetrix.com