A Text to HTML ratio is something that search engine experts rarely consider. Let’s start with saying it’s not a ranking factor. While it does not pose a significant threat regarding SEO, it can affect user experience.

Let’s check why this text ratio is essential and the best way to use it for your site.

What is Text to HTML Ratio?

To put it just, your web page is written in HTML code and the content displayed is usually in the text. The text to HTML ratio (also correlated to text to code or code to text) is the correlation percentage of original text content discovered in a page.

How is Text/ HTML Ratio Calculated?

Initially, you can check it manually by simply taking a look at how much text is displayed in your web page versus its HTML code (headings, links, JavaScript, images, etc.) You could also discover a free checker tool and check it automatically. The ratio checkers usually extract text from paragraphs and anchor texts from the code, then calculate the content ratio based on these patterns.

How does Google utilize this metric?

Having a low text to HTML ratio won’t send any negative signal to Google or other search engines by itself. Still, it can indicate there are some other issues with your site. See it as more of an indicator to detect if the code can be cleaned and to help improve page load times.

Here are some actual reasons why it’s better to improve it:

• Google utilizes this metric to see the actual relevancy of a web page.
• This ratio may also be an indication of an HTML heavy web page which can affect loading speed and users experience. Big size of a web page, a lot of image tags, and new link here and there can all indicate that you want to work on your HTML and CSS.

How to fix the low code to text ratio?

An excellent way to address this problem is for websites to remove elements from the code that are not needed and repair other errors:

• Your HTML code wants to be valid; you can check this out with several online tools – it will take some time.
• Specific elements like JavaScript, tables, flash, large white spaces, more tabs, and comments can all raise the number of code you have on your web pages.
• Loading speed is a good way to check coding efficiency. If your website is loading slowly, this will intimate you have more HTML elements. Always, try to improve your website speed!
• Make sure there are too many simple texts on a web page and remove any text that is not visible to users.
• The size of your web page must be as minimal as possible; it’s enough to keep it under 300 kb. CSS need to utilize for styling and formatting. And it is much better to be exported in an external file.

Despite your text/ HTML ratio, make sure to implement all these solutions if potential. Still, if you need a range you should fit in, code to text ratio between 20% and 70% is considered normal.

The people tend to go overboard when it comes to web page design, adding different elements just to make things more engaging and colorful. While this might have a positive impact on your visitors, it is destructive for search engines.

Also, never forget: unless you can satisfy Google, you will not get more traffic to justify your intricate design.

Conclusion

SEO experts rarely use a ratio. It really matters that most professionals keep their code clean & simple. So, there is no requirement to preoccupy themselves too much with this percentage.

Despite, if you are starting to learn more about SEO, this metric is an excellent indication of whether or not you are having too many elements in your code. It can also point you to some issues with thin content that you will need to address. They can have such a negative impact on site’s loading speed so it’s better to remove them.