Sitecore 10.4 SXA Product Issue: Handling Japanese Characters in og:title Meta Tags

Hello All,

Upgrading a Sitecore environment can introduce powerful new features—along with the occasional unexpected quirk. After recently upgrading our Sitecore instance from 10.1 to 10.4, we encountered a curious issue with Japanese language support in Open Graph meta tags, specifically in the og:title and og:description fields.

In this post, I’ll share what we observed, how we investigated it, and what we learned from Sitecore Support. This is especially relevant for teams working with multilingual Sitecore implementations using SXA.

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🐞 The Issue: Encoded Characters in og:title for Japanese Content

Our website is primarily in Japanese. Post-upgrade, we found that Japanese text displayed properly on the page and in the <title> tag, but the same text looked strangely encoded in the page source when rendered inside og:title and og:description meta tags.

🔍 Example:

• Expected (in CMS and browser preview):
  og:title: レパーサ

• Actual (in page source):
  og:title: レパーサ

This appeared to be a character encoding issue. The Japanese text was rendered as HTML entities (numeric character references), making it unreadable in the raw HTML.

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💡 What’s Actually Happening?

• Webpage Display: Japanese characters show correctly in the visible UI and browser tab.

• HTML Source View: Open Graph meta tags are HTML-encoded (e.g., レ for “レ”).

• Impact Scope: Only affects Open Graph meta tags; other fields are rendered as expected.

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🔎 Investigation and Sitecore Support Findings

After escalating the issue to Sitecore Support and sharing reproducible examples:

• Reproducibility: Sitecore confirmed the issue occurs when non-Latin characters are used in Open Graph fields—particularly on pages set to English language.

• Bug ID: The issue has been registered as a known bug under SXA-8361.

• Severity: It’s considered cosmetic—while the source code looks odd, browsers and social media platforms render the characters correctly.

• Next Steps: Sitecore asked us to evaluate the urgency of a fix, since the bug doesn’t impact how content is displayed or shared.

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🤔 Why Does This Happen?

Sitecore (like many CMS platforms) sometimes HTML-encodes non-ASCII characters in meta tag content to ensure compatibility with all HTML parsers. While this approach works functionally, it creates visually confusing source code for anyone inspecting it.

Fortunately, most platforms and scrapers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) automatically decode these entities when rendering shared content.

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⚠️ Should You Be Concerned?

Short Answer: Not in most cases.

✅ You’re likely fine if:

• Browsers display content as expected.

• Social media previews correctly render Japanese characters.

• Search engines can interpret both raw Unicode and HTML-encoded entities, so there’s no SEO penalty.

❗ You should test more thoroughly if:

• Your systems rely on custom integrations, analytics scripts, or scrapers that directly parse meta tags from the source and expect raw Unicode.

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🛠️ What Can You Do?

Here are a few steps to manage the situation:

• Track the Bug: Follow the progress of SXA-8361 via Sitecore Support.

• Test Social Sharing: Use tools like Facebook Sharing Debugger or Twitter Card Validator to preview how content appears when shared.

• Communicate Internally: Inform developers, QA, and content teams that this is a known product issue with no immediate functional impact.

• Customization (Advanced Option): If raw Unicode output is absolutely essential for business needs, consider customizing SXA’s meta tag rendering pipeline—but weigh the long-term maintenance cost.

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🧾 Conclusion

Upgrading to Sitecore 10.4 helped us unlock new capabilities, but also revealed some localized content quirks. Seeing Japanese characters encoded in Open Graph tags may feel concerning, but it’s largely a cosmetic issue.

Sitecore has acknowledged and logged the bug. For now, most users and platforms will experience your Japanese content correctly—even if the page source looks messy.

If you’ve encountered similar localization issues post-upgrade or have advice to share, please drop a comment below or connect with us. Sharing knowledge helps strengthen the whole Sitecore community.

Note: I will share the solution as soon as I receive an update from the Sitecore Product Team.

I hope you enjoy this Sitecore blog. Stay tuned for more Sitecore related articles.

Till that happy Sitecoring :)

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