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Tutorial on how to fix Avoid a character set in the meta tag error in GTmetrix

Another error you may encounter when testing site speed with GTmetrix, which is very rare, is the Avoid a character set in the meta tag error. This error, as shown from the beginning of the phrase with the word Avoid, means that you are not facing a red line, and it is not mandatory that you must fix it. But it is preferable to fix it. Before the utf8 character set was created, most operating systems and programming compilers worked with the old ASCII system. In this system (Ski system), each character occupies one byte or eight bits of space. As a result, the total number of characters that can be covered in this system was 256 characters. So this amount was not enough to maintain different languages. This is how the character set was created.

In this tutorial from Hostfa’s knowledge base is going to show you the methods that you can use to specify the type of character set on the site. Today, most browsers use this feature well. Apart from this, in HTML5 language, the default mode is on this value, so it cannot be said that the Avoid a character set in the meta tag error is a common thing in GTmetrix, and it will be in green mode for you.

Avoid a character set error training in the meta tag.

What the character set does on the site is that it is recognized as an international standard, and it solves the issues related to the multilingual information exchange of a site that are already defined. In other words, this international standard specifies how the content of the site should be shown to users depending on the language, which the browser will recognize. This international standard has several different types, the most widely used mode is UTF-8, which you must have learned about when learning HTML.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> 

Now, the problem in this field is that in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which is common from version 8 and below, we have to come and use its own header to optimize the site’s loading time. In this browser and some other browsers, this metatag is present on all pages, and as the visitor goes to each page, this item is checked by the server and after a positive or negative answer is sent, the site will start loading according to this answer. did This issue causes a problem in the state that is on all pages, so it is better to specify this case once from the server side for the user and stay in this state forever.

Fixed the Avoid a character set in the meta tag error in GTmetrix

When you test your site with GT metrics, in most cases, this item is green and there will be no problem. But if you encounter a problem with this option, to solve the problem, what you need to do is to send the character set metatag to the user in the form of an HTTP request. That means we have to come and specify this request as an HTTP header using the server language and server type. In this case, depending on the language used and the server you are using, you can use the following solutions.

Avoid a character set error training in the meta tag

in php language

If you are using PHP on your site and you encounter the error Avoid a character set in the meta tag, you can create this request in the header using the following command.

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8"); 

Nginx server

If the language used on your site is something other than PHP, such as asp or python, etc., you must see what type of web server is used before doing anything. If you are using the Nginx web server, you can create this request using the following code in the config section of the server.

more_set_headers -t 'text/html' 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'; 

Apache server

But if you are using the Apache web server, you must include the following code in the htaccess file. Enter.

AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' html 

Depending on the programming language and type of server, after creating the request in the header as HTTP, you will check the site again and see that the error has been resolved and the Avoid a character set in the meta tag option in GT Matrix is ​​green. Will be displayed.

I hope this tutorial has been of interest to you and that you were able to fix the Avoid a character set in the meta tag error in gtmetrix by using it. If you have any questions or problems in this regard, let us know in the comments section