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Text to Code ratio

Learn about the text to code ratio and its significance in SEO. Discover how it can indicate technical issues and impact page performance.

Updated over a year ago

OnCrawl reports an average text to code ratio in the Content section of all crawl reports.

average text to code ratio in Oncrawl

What is a text to code ratio?

A text to code ratio is measures how much of the content of a page is visible content (text), and how much is content encoding (code).

The higher the percentage reported, the more text on the page in comparison with the amount of code on the page.

Why it is useful to keep an eye on a text to code ratio

Text to code ratios are not used by Google as a ranking factor.

However, text to code ratios are indicative of other technical issues on a web page.

A very low text to code ratio may indicate "code bloat", or cases where there is excessive or erroneous code.

When a page group with a poor text to code ratio also has issues with load time or page size, the performance issues can often be solved by reviewing and reducing the code on the page: are there resources or calls to third-party scripts that are slowing the pages down or significantly increasing their size?

A low text to code issue can also indicate cases of very thin content.

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