The 21-Point Technical SEO Checklist We Run on Every Site

Content earns rankings; technical foundations decide whether that content can rank at all. This is the 21-point checklist our engineers run on every new SEO engagement — do it once properly, and every article you publish afterwards works harder.

Crawling & indexing (points 1–6)

1) One canonical version of the site — www or not, HTTPS always, everything else 301s. 2) robots.txt allows what matters, blocks faceted noise. 3) XML sitemap contains only indexable 200-status URLs. 4) No accidental noindex leftovers from staging. 5) Internal links reach every important page within three clicks. 6) 404s and redirect chains cleaned — chains waste crawl budget and dilute equity.

Speed & Core Web Vitals (points 7–12)

7) LCP under 2.5s on mobile — usually image optimisation, preloading the hero, and killing render-blocking CSS. 8) INP under 200ms — defer non-critical JS, split long tasks. 9) CLS under 0.1 — dimension every image and ad slot. 10) Cache everything cacheable at the edge. 11) Compress with Brotli. 12) Ship modern image formats (WebP/AVIF). On WordPress, our Speed Optimizer plugin covers most of this out of the box.

Structure & schema (points 13–17)

13) One H1 per page, heading hierarchy that mirrors content logic. 14) Organization/Website schema site-wide; Article, Product, FAQ, LocalBusiness where relevant — as one connected @graph, not fragments. 15) Breadcrumbs with schema. 16) Clean, wordful URLs. 17) hreflang if you serve multiple regions — wrong hreflang is worse than none.

Rendering & modern pitfalls (points 18–21)

18) Confirm Google sees your content: inspect the rendered HTML, not your dev tools. JS-only content on slow-rendering pages still loses. 19) Pagination that exposes deep content via crawlable links. 20) Faceted navigation contained with canonicals and parameter rules. 21) Log-file review quarterly — where Googlebot actually spends time is often a surprise, and always instructive.

Run this quarterly and after every redesign or migration. Or let us run it — our Technical SEO service delivers this exact audit with the fixes implemented, not just listed in a PDF.