Website validation errors are like building code violations. Would you move into a house that the building inspector said had 78 building code violations? No way. Well look at the annotated screen print below. There is a website homepage with 78 validation errors. That means the official website inspector (which is called the W3C Markup Validation Service) said there were 78 violations of the rules that all websites are supposed to adhere to.
Can Website Validation Errors Cause You Problems?
You better believe it – the answer is yes. Absolutely. Here is a list of reasons why validation errors can cause you and your business problems…
- First of all the errors are an indication that the web design team was “less than professional”. If they made this many mistakes here where else did they make mistakes?
- This many errors is almost a guarantee that the site is not “cross-browser compliant” meaning it’s going to look different or broken on different browsers.
- There is a good chance the search engine spiders will get confused and not be able to crawl your site completely. When they hit lots and lots of errors they just give up trying to crawl your site and they put you on the back burner in terms of crawling it again.
- Forget about Google PageRank. The site might actually rank for some of it’s key phrases, but it most likely will have a PageRank of zero. If Google can’t crawl the site they are not going to give it a lot of PageRank credit.
- Security problems? You bet. A site with this many problems also probably has left big opportunities for hackers to do malicious damage using your website.
- If your web designer tells you the ton of validation errors in the website they build for you are normal or they aren’t doing any harm… pack up and leave (politely). They are lying or they know so little about building websites they actually believe the errors are a joke.
- SEO problems. Use the validator errors as a Red Flag. Look for a complete lack of Search Engine Optimization and you will probably find your misgivings were correct. Having no clue when building a website usually means they have no clue when charging you for SEO as well.
Now that is a bit horrifying to programmers that know what they’re doing. A lot of what we do at Web Design Workplace is to save companies from code that looks like that. But this is a good time for a “before and after” look at website validation.
Here is a picture of the Web Design Workplace homepage after running it through the official W3C Validator… Perfect with no errors. Just the way we deliver websites to you.
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