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Technical SEO checklist: audit your own site in 20 points

Technical SEO is the layer beneath content: if Google cannot find, open or understand your page, it will not rank however good your copy is. You can check all twenty points below from your browser, with free tools.

8 min read

Access and indexing

  1. Does the site load over HTTPS? Does the HTTP version redirect to HTTPS? Type http:// in the address bar and see.
  2. Do the www and non-www versions resolve to one address? If both open independently, Google sees two sites.
  3. Is robots.txt blocking crawling? Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. A Disallow: / left over from launch is one of the most expensive mistakes we see.
  4. Do your pages carry noindex? View source and look for the robots meta tag.
  5. Is there a sitemap.xml, and is it current? Listing pages that no longer exist wastes your crawl budget.
  6. Are you set up in Search Console? If not, you are guessing at what Google sees on your site. It is free.

Page-level fundamentals

  1. Does every page have its own <title>? Around 25–65 characters; titles copied across a template do harm.
  2. Is the meta description written? It is not a ranking factor, but it decides your click-through rate. 70–170 characters is a good range.
  3. Is there exactly one <h1>? Zero or five leaves the subject of the page ambiguous.
  4. Is <html lang="…"> set?
  5. Is there a canonical tag? If the same content is reachable at several addresses, it says which one is the original.
  6. On a multilingual site, is hreflang correct? Each language must point to the others and to itself.

Speed and mobile

  1. Is the viewport meta tag there? Without it, mobile browsers shrink the desktop layout to fit.
  2. Are images served at the size they are displayed? Serving a 1000×1000 image into a 300×300 box is downloaded bytes thrown away.
  3. Do images have width and height? Without them the page jumps as it loads (CLS).
  4. Is compression on? You should see content-encoding: gzip or br in the response headers.
  5. Do you pass the Core Web Vitals thresholds? LCP under 2.5 s, INP under 200 ms, CLS under 0.1. See our Core Web Vitals article for detail.

Meaning and trust

  1. Is structured data (JSON-LD) in place? Organisation, product, FAQ and article schemas change how you appear in the results.
  2. Are the Open Graph tags there? Without them your link is shared on WhatsApp and LinkedIn as a bare address with no preview.

If you would rather not do this one by one

We built a tool that checks most of this list automatically. Leave your address, we will scan it, go through the findings ourselves and write to you within one business day. Free, no commitment.