Validation on Wordpress

[Old_Honky]

Is validation of CSS and Html necessary or possible with wordpress.

I'm in the final stages of building a responsive site in wordpress, It looks fine in all the main browsers but the validators show several errors and warnings. I have added some css and html, but that's not showing up as a problem. I don't feel confident about editing the original css on the template and add-ons I am using, because I don't want to effect things that I don't understand.

On the basis that if it works it's OK, can I just ignore the validation?

I notice that all of the big sites that I have checked do not validate including Webmaster World which shows 54 errors on CSS and blocks html validation.

[travelin cat]

Others may disagree with me, but I never do the validation suggestions and I have no evidence at all that this has affected rankings on any of the sites I have created over the years. I stopped checking them years ago.

[TorontoBoy]

I, too, never validate my Wordpress sites, as they invariably have some supposed error.

On a side note, the proper way to change your theme is to use a child theme. Make the changes in your child theme, and when the parent theme is updated you inherit the new changes. This is also somewhat of a backup if you change some css and it does not work out. Using a child theme reduces risks of something going wrong. PHP is pretty easy to hack, so try something in your child theme, and if it does not work you can undo it without issues.

[Old_Honky]

Thanks guys, you have confirmed my suspicions

[Brett_Tabke]

However, there are so many bots running now (social, search, research) that some of them are not as adapt at reading html as others. For instance, a misplaced comment in a meta tag used to trip up TwitterBot. Thus, many of the linked tweets were buried on 404's.

At worst, I would run your main pages through some form of crawler and looks for weirdness in the reports.