Even a perfectly running website needs to be validated. Before we discuss the reason why we need to validate a website, we will discuss first what it means to be validated? Website validation is process of writing and designing a website in a ‘cleanest’ possible way and testing it against industry standards.

I would like to quote an excerpt from W3C website on how they view the importance of validating the website. It states: "Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language."

Here are some benefits you could get in validating your website.

1) Compatibility

When you fully validated your website, you don’t have to worry that your website will display unpredictably in different browsers. For instance, your website may work perfectly on Internet Explorer but it would have problem displaying on Mozilla Firefox and Safari because you "coded it differently." The validation process makes the code uniform, which also means that you will not have an unprofessional and unpredictable looking website or run the risk of losing potential customer who does not use Internet Explorer.

2) Search Engine Optimization

A website with "clean" codes are more SEO friendly than the website with many "loose coding." Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing indexed "clean" pages faster than those who are not. The easier the search engines indexed your site the faster they can find your content. Another thing is, if your website is not validated it is more possible that search engines will place more emphasis on the wrong part of your code as a result your site could be missing out on being found for the most appropriate searches.

3) Accessibility

Validation could make your site readable. It would allow you to use many accessibility techniques such as the use of ALT tag on images.

4) Faster loading

Validating your website can help a lot in improving its load time which is very essential in creating good impression to your visitors. Commonly, conventional websites utilizes tables and use extensive amount of tags for formatting the page structures as well as the content. These could contribute in the slowing down of your load time. However, the use of CSS separates the structure from the content and gives the browsers less code to trawl through before they can successfully render the page. Validation also aids the browser in displaying the site faster as there is no 'loose coding' for the browser to get tangled up in or waste time trying to 'fix'.

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