How to Make Your Joomla Website W3C Compliant

Let us start this post by explaining, in very concise terms, what is W3C compliance:

W3C compliance is ensuring that the page has no HTML errors according to the W3C standards.

W3C compliance has several benefits:

1. It’s good for SEO: It is well known that Google, as well as other search engines, consider websites that are W3C compliant as “clean” and “well-maintained” and rank them higher in their search results.

2. It resolves formatting errors on your website: Making a website W3C compliant resolves most formatting errors on your website (e.g. formatting errors caused by unclosed tags or non-existent properties).

3. It makes your website faster to load on the browser’s end: A website that is plagued with HTML errors will load slowly, mainly because the browser will need to spend more time correcting the HTML code in order to display it properly (or at least to try to display it properly) for the end user.

Now, after reading the benefits of W3C compliance, you are probably more interested than ever in making your Joomla website W3C compliant.

Here’s how to do this: Go to validator.w3.org and validate your website, and see what errors you see, then go ahead and fix each and every error/warning you see.

You should first start with fixing the template errors, these HTML errors are found in your template files (e.g. the index.php under your templates/[template-name] folder and all the files under the html directory under the aforementioned directory).

Once you do that, you should fix the HTML errors in your modules’ template files. Your modules’ template files are located under the modules/[module-name]/tmpl folder.

Once you have fixed the HTML in the modules, then your next step is to run the HTML validator again. If your website is still not HTML valid, then most likely you still have some HTML errors in one or more of the following:

• Your content: For example your articles or your K2 articles (in case you have K2 installed). If your homepage is not validating, then you should check the HTML of the article that is displayed on the homepage.

• A 3^rd party content plugin: A content plugin makes some modifications to your content prior to serving it to your clients. If the content plugin injects some wrong HTML, then your website won’t validate. Disable content plugins one by one and see if that solves the problem. If and when it does, then the last content plugin disabled is the cause of the problem. Note that Joomla’s content plugins do not cause issues in your HTML, so your best bet is to check 3^rd party content plugins.

• A 3^rd party component: If you’re displaying a 3^rd party component on the homepage, then the problem could be a wrong HTML in the template files of that component, which are found in components/component-name/templates. You should check these files for any errors, and fix these errors, if any.

If you’re having some hard time in making your Joomla website W3C compliant, then all you need to do is to contact us and we’ll handle this issue for you. We are professional and proficient in Joomla, we are fast, and we won’t charge you much.