About this episode

The episode explores the importance of the head element in HTML and its impact on web performance, accessibility, and SEO.

This is the third episode in the series exploring the different components that make up a website, and today’s focus is on the often-overlooked but vitally important head element in HTML. Nathan and David kick things off by admitting that, like many web professionals, they haven’t thought deeply about the head for quite some time, despite its massive impact on performance, accessibility, and SEO. Drawing from their own experiences as CMS users and enthusiasts, they dig into what the head is, the key tags you can (and must) use, and which practices are still essential in modern web development. They cover everything from the basic meta tags you need for setting character encoding, viewport scaling, and page titles, to why the order of scripts and styles in your head can dramatically affect site speed and user experience. David explains some of the technical nuances, like choosing between inline styles and external stylesheets and recent updates that now allow for SVG favicons with light and dark mode support, thanks to the latest version of Safari. They also discuss SEO considerations, such as canonical tags, language declarations, and social sharing metadata, along with hands-on…

People in this episode

Hosts: Nathan Wrigley, David Waumsley

Topics covered

• HTML head element
• web performance
• accessibility
• SEO
• meta tags
• web development

Keywords

• head element
• meta tags
• SEO
• web development
• performance
• accessibility
• character encoding

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Safari

More episodes of No Script Show

• Ep30. Content design · April 2, 2026 · 36 min
• Ep29. Making a website owners manual · March 13, 2026 · 60 min
• Ep28. Trap or Trade off What small businesses should know before getting a website · February 6, 2026 · 54 min
• Ep27. Enshittification. Why We Need Independent Websites. · January 8, 2026 · 1h 6m
• Ep26. Google Ads for Local Businesses. Avoid costly mistakes. · November 29, 2025 · 41 min
• Ep25. Form options for static websites · September 10, 2025 · 50 min

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