This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung →
SEO
Why does my website show question marks instead of umlauts?
Question marks, boxes, or garbled characters instead of ä, ö, and ü happen when the browser guesses a page's character set wrong — because the character-set declaration is missing from the source code. This one line establishes which scheme the page's characters should be read by. With it, umlauts and special characters reliably display correctly, on every device and in every browser.
The character set is the browser's reading instructions
A computer stores text as sequences of numbers. Which number corresponds to which letter is governed by the character set — the reading instructions for the browser. For umlauts and the German ß, several such instructions exist historically, and they assign the same numbers to different characters. If your page doesn't explicitly state which instructions apply, the browser has to guess. If it guesses wrong, "Müller" becomes "Müller" or a question mark in a box. The character-set declaration in the source code ends the guessing: it fixes the encoding definitively — today usually UTF-8, which covers every language and special character.
Broken umlauts damage trust and readability
A page full of garbled characters immediately looks broken — visitors infer a lack of care on the business's part from the broken display, even if the content is correct. Search engines read the same mangled text: "Kitchen furniture" becomes a character string nobody searches for, and the page loses its connection to exactly the terms it should be found for. The declaration also has to sit early in the source code, since the browser starts rendering immediately — if the reading instructions only appear far down, part of the page is already built incorrectly. Our check verifies whether the declaration is present on every page; its absence counts as a minor, easily fixed shortcoming.
- Spot-check whether umlauts and the ß display correctly on every page — on a smartphone too.
- Ask your agency to embed the UTF-8 character-set declaration early in every page's source code.
- After redesigns or a provider switch, specifically check older text for garbled characters.
- Also watch automatically generated page parts like forms or confirmation pages — garbled characters there often go unnoticed for a long time.
FAQ
Why do umlauts display incorrectly on my website?
The browser reads the page's text with the wrong character-set instructions — usually because the character-set declaration is missing from the source code and it has to guess. ä, ö, and ü then become question marks, boxes, or character combinations like "ü". Your agency fixes this with one line in the source code that fixes the UTF-8 encoding definitively.
What is UTF-8?
UTF-8 is the character set commonly used for websites today: an encoding that covers practically every writing character in the world — German umlauts just as much as currency symbols or foreign-language letters. If UTF-8 is explicitly declared in the source code, every browser renders the characters identically and correctly. That's why we check every page for whether the declaration is present.
Where does the character-set declaration have to sit?
Early in the source code, in the page's head section. The browser starts rendering the content immediately — if the declaration sits too far down, it may already have processed the start of the page with a wrongly guessed encoding. Your agency usually places the line as one of the first entries in the document head.