Low Text to HTML ratio

Would love to your opinion about low text to html ratio. I get these notifications at times from Ahrefs and SEM Rush audits, and I am wondering whether I should do something about it.

I get it on pages that have 2,000+ words, where the content is nicely structured so it's not as if the content is not good enough. But, the pages do have html blocks for each section and there are some 18 sections per page.

The pages rank well regardless, even though the site is some 10 months old, but I was just wondering if I should act upon this before it can hurt my rankings.

Does it affect page speed? I suspect it does, because it's adding (unnecessary elements?) to the DOM? ( I don't know this for sure but think so, a bit of a semi-educated guess).

If time permits, you could test it out. Run a page speed test. Duplicate the page with a test name. Remove/amalgamate/combine half the blocks. Test.

I'm guessing you need the blocks separately (as you have now) for on page jump linking?

Actually, the page speed is amazing: 97 on Mobile and 99 on Desktop.

Yes, for quick jump menu links. I could make the changes to decrease the number of sections, but with 100+ payment method pages already live, I would rather avoid that :)

Well it could be that dropping some blocks might push the PS up further. Personally I would sell my grandma for a 97 score :-) So on that basis I personally would leave well alone, given whatever it's telling you is not affecting rankings, and I'm guessing there are no obvious page element reflows.

Maybe someone else will come up with a more sensible/applicable suggestion for which 'excessive' html may be causing a problem which is not obvious.

Edit Oh, just thought. Crawl depth maybe? Too many elements, and G won't crawl the whole page. Another guess, but possible in certain scenarios.

Ha ha, I am obviously delighted with the page speed :)

Yeah, with no adverse effect atm, I didn't plan on doing anything about it. But, if it can have a negative effect in the future, I would reconsider.

Right, the crawl depth may be an issue. Thanks for your input. Let's see whether anyone else has some experience with this.

Oddly enough, I had this appear in SEMRush yesterday for the first time. Every single page was flagged as having the same thing - Low text to HTML ratio.

I ran a few pages through other Google tools and they all seemed to be OK, so I'm just leaving it week to see if its a change within SEMRush itself thats been done and will fix itself.

I have been flagged for this with various tools before. The pages rank. Well. So who cares.

One thing that does trouble me is the GPSI flagging for too many DOM elements. This leads to slow mobile responsiveness when the DOM becomes too large as mobile devices have less processing power.

Unfortunately, tweaking and trimming the DOM for speed is not something I know how to do. Nor have I ever really found any good and actionable information on how to do so. Thus, some of our larger pages suffer with DOMs with 1500 elements in them, although our page scores are often 99-100 because we fix all errors we can.

As stated by Google itself, he does not like it when the page is very little content, he believes that such pages will not bring any benefit to the user. In this case, if it is pages that need only the user you can hide them in the tag noindex, follow, google will go to them but will not add them to the index and will not take them into account. Perhaps in different parsers this problem will remain, but we are not working to rank in Ahrefs!