On an old, poorly configured website you sometimes see something like "caf\u00e9" where it should say 'café'. Or question marks where accents belong. That is caused by the wrong 'character encoding': the way your site tells the browser which character standard is being used.
What is UTF-8?
UTF-8 is the universal standard for text on the internet. It supports every language in the world, every accent, symbol and emoji. Virtually every modern website uses UTF-8.
This matters for many languages, Dutch included: it has accents (é, ë, à, ï) that show up as odd characters without UTF-8. Want a word like "één" to appear exactly as you typed it? UTF-8 makes sure it is correct everywhere.
What goes wrong without UTF-8?
- Accents appear as strange characters (â, é, é)
- Question marks (\?) where accents used to be
- Emojis turn into squares
- Prices with a euro sign turn into gibberish
- Google indexes your page less well because it does not know how to read the text
What can you do?
Usually nothing at all. If you have a WordPress site (or use a modern website builder), UTF-8 is switched on by default. It is a setting in the HTML: <meta charset="UTF-8">.
If the mini audit flags a problem here: get in touch with your web developer. They only need to change one line of code. 5 minutes of work, but still important, because without the correct encoding your site looks amateurish.
How do you check it yourself?
Right-click on your site, click 'View page source' and search for 'charset'. Within the first 10 lines you should see: <meta charset="UTF-8">. If you see something else, such as 'iso-8859-1', or nothing at all: have it changed.