What it is
Every letter, number, and symbol on a computer is ultimately stored as numbers — "character encoding" (or "charset") is simply the agreed-upon system for which number means which character. UTF-8 is the standard, near-universal encoding used across the modern web, capable of representing virtually every character in every language, from plain English letters to emoji to accented characters like é or ñ.
The charset meta tag is a single line in a page's code that tells the browser "read this page's text using the UTF-8 system." Without it, a browser has to guess which system was used, and an incorrect guess is exactly what causes apostrophes and quotation marks to turn into strange strings of symbols like ’.
Why it matters
Garbled characters are one of the fastest ways to make a page look broken or untrustworthy at a glance, even if every word underneath is spelled correctly. It's a purely cosmetic problem in the sense that the underlying text is usually fine — but visitors don't know that, and a paragraph full of odd symbols reads as sloppy or even suspicious.
The fix is also unusually cheap for how visible the problem is: this is one line of code, added once, that resolves the issue site-wide rather than needing to be fixed page by page.
How to fix it
- Add
<meta charset="UTF-8">as the very first line inside your page's<head>section — it needs to come before other tags for browsers to apply it correctly. - If you're using a website builder or CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow), this is virtually always already set correctly in the site template — a garbled-text problem is more often caused by content pasted in from another program (like Microsoft Word) carrying its own hidden encoding.
- If pasting from Word or another document editor is the culprit, try pasting as "plain text" instead, then reapply any bold/italic formatting inside your editor.
- Reload the affected page after making changes and check that apostrophes, quotation marks, and any accented letters now display correctly.
- Re-run your Launch Readiness check to confirm the charset tag is now detected.