How Important is W3C Validation for Your Website?

Validation is one of the important factors that determine the quality of web design. It refers to comparing formatted HTML and XHTML files with the defined W3C standards.

What is W3C?

W3C is referred to as World Wide Web Consortium which is being defined as standard coding guidelines. All markups and coding are subject to abide by W3C to run forward with future business aspects.

It is similar to checking your sentence in accordance with the general grammar rules of language in which it has been written. Just like there are rules in grammar language, similarly, in computer programming, there is a set of rules which must be followed during every website project.

W3C validation ensures the following:

• Your website would be easily surfed by several types of Internet-accessible devices such as smartphones and ipads.

• W3C validation shrinks the code size on your web pages and adds value to your web content.

• Your website and its components would load faster on a wide range of browsers.

• W3C compliance is fully compatible with an array of scripting languages, dynamic pages, multimedia presentations and more.

According to a survey, most of web designers and professionals have mentioned that validation errors are the first thing they will inspect in a website’s design. This makes it more important for your website to ensure that your CSS and markup languages are W3C validated in order to create interactive layouts for your website.

One of the most important advantages of W3C validation is that it effectively eliminates the unnoticeable coding errors that cannot be detected. This encourages the programmer to incorporate a variety of styles and layouts in your website’s design.

Why Validate Your Website?

• Helps You Improve Site Ranking

  Errors in your code can affect the performance of your site and also make a big impact on your site’s SEO, search engines check the HTML/XHTML code of your website while crawling.

• Teaches Best Practice

  Having a standards-compliant code is the best practice. It also teaches and encourages error-free code for web design.

• Improves User-Experience

  Validation improves usability and functionality because your users are less likely to run into any bugs/errors when displayed on browsers as compared to non-validated websites.

• Makes Website Responsive

  With the boom in smartphones and tablets, more people will be accessing the Internet from mobile devices rather than desktop computers. With that, there will be an increase in surfing website from mobile. W3C-check will leave your code with no errors, hence responsive.

• Makes Website Look Good in all Browser

  Making websites browsers friendly is one of the most important reasons why W3C validation was introduced. Websites that are not validated may display differently for different browsers. The cross-browser problem was faced by many websites. Websites that are not validated may show formatting problems when used in certain browsers.

• Easy To Code & Maintain

  Websites or web pages that validate using W3C website validation have code formatted well and are easy to edit and it helps programmer to create a new page.

• Used As A Debugging Tool

  W3C Validators tell you where you have errors in your code. If your page isn’t displaying according to a standard set of rules a validator will point the errors.

How do you Validate Your Code?

Validation is comparing your code to W3C standards. The best practice to validate your code is using the W3C validation tools.

Link: http://validator.w3.org/

So, next time you develop a website or even design a page don’t forget to validate it as per W3C standards.