The online web appears to be immensely simple – You design, code, write, and optimize the cream of the cake and assume you are ready. Many of the internet users are not even aware of these behind the page works and we don’t even expect everyone to know everything. That’s the reason we first educate our clients and then help them with what they need.
What is a Code to Text Ratio?
In the simplest words
Code to Text ratio(a.k.a. Text to HTML ratio) refers to the quantity of text versus HTML in the a web page. Allegedly, some say it affects the search rankings of a web page, let’s find out!
For a very long time, SEO experts assumed that search engines preferred a high code to text ratio and that determines the “relevancy of a page”, but here is a fact by answered by John Mueller from Google himself, “No.”
The answer does not raise many brows but makes it evidently clear that most search engines are looking for quality content writing in your landing page rather than anything else and nothing can be derived if the algorithms take Code to Text ratio into consideration for ranking. So if you are looking from the ranking POV, this ratio is not important and nor does it matter what ratio your page scores.
The code to text ratio significantly helps to determine whether your page is optimized and coded well for the users and for the search engine crawlers to rank.
So why is it even a matter of discussion?
Code to text ratio can help you identify inefficient code and indicate page load speed which directly affects user experience and hence, affects your ranking.
A low Text to HTML ratio on a page with high content is an indicator of inefficient coding, which is an underlying reason for bad SEO performance.
Lighter and cleaner the code, faster the page loads. A slower page will, in turn, hit your ranking. Therefore, a high Code to Text ratio is a sign you need to immediately work on.
From the above, you may have derived that working on your Code to Text ratio is not directly affecting your rankings but should not be ignored. But a ratio that indicates more HTML than text should be evaluated and worked upon to make the page efficient and readable for search engine crawlers.
The key to optimizing your web page is to build it focusing on user experience. Follow these tips to optimize your page’s text to HTML ratio and increase user-experience:
- Remove huge white spaces
- Avoid lots of tabs
- Remove comments in the code
- Avoid tables or use image of the table instead
- Optimize your images and remove unnecessary ones
- Use Javascript and flash only if required
- Remove any hidden text that is not visible to the user
- Always have some amount of plain text
Here are 10 Important and technical tips to improve your web page speed.