# How to declare the character encoding > Declaring UTF-8 in the first 1024 bytes stops browsers from guessing and prevents garbled characters. Best practices · HTML version: https://getreport.app/learn/charset ## Character encoding declaration Passing looks like: Character encoding is declared early. **Why it matters.** Browsers need to know the encoding before they read the text. When it is missing or declared late, accented letters such as č, ć and š can appear as garbage and the page re-renders. **How to fix it.** 1. Put as the first element inside , within the first 1024 bytes of the document. 2. Or send it in the response header: Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8. Check your own page: https://getreport.app/