SiteAud!tLint Support

Warning Accessibility

Missing lang attribute

Severity
Warning
Impact
Low
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
lang_missing

Why it matters

The html lang attribute tells screen readers and search engines which language the page uses.

How to fix it

Add lang to the html element, for example <html lang="en">.

What this means

The page's <html> element has no lang attribute, so browsers, screen readers and translation tools have to guess the language.

<html lang="en">

Why it matters

  • Accessibility. Screen readers pick their pronunciation rules from lang. Without it, an English page can be read aloud with the voice and pronunciation of the listener's system language. WCAG 2 requires it (success criterion 3.1.1).
  • Translation and browsers. Chrome's translate prompt, hyphenation and spell checking use it.
  • Search. Google says it detects language from the visible text rather than this attribute, so the direct SEO effect is small. It still matters for multilingual sites: Bing uses it as a language signal, and a lang value that matches your hreflang tags keeps every signal consistent.

Common causes

The attribute belongs in one place, the site's main layout or theme template, so a missing value usually affects every page at once. Hand-built landing pages and old static templates are the usual exceptions.

How to fix it

  1. Add lang to the <html> tag in the layout template, using a language code such as en, or a language and region such as en-GB or pt-BR.
  2. On multilingual sites, set it per page to the language of that page's content, matching its hreflang value.
  3. For a passage in another language inside a page, add lang to that element, for example <blockquote lang="fr">.

Verify the fix

Recrawl. A template-level fix clears the issue on every page in the same audit; pages that still show it use a different template.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Accessibility score 3 points, plus up to 12 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. Weakens rankings, crawling or measurement. Fix after critical issues.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Missing lang attribute. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code lang_missing. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.