Technical SEO Checklist: A Healthy Site in 25 Points

Crawling and indexing

1. The site loads over HTTPS and HTTP redirects automatically.
2. robots.txt doesn't block important sections.
3. The XML sitemap is current and referenced in robots.txt.
4. Every page has a correct canonical tag.
5. Unneeded pages are excluded with noindex.
6. Redirect chains are one hop at most.
7. Missing pages really return a 404 status.

On-page essentials

1. Every page has a unique 50–60 character title.
2. Meta descriptions are 120–160 characters and page-specific.
3. Each page has a single H1.
4. Images have alt text.
5. The lang attribute and, on multilingual sites, hreflang are correct.

Speed and experience

1. LCP under 2.5 seconds.
2. INP under 200 milliseconds.
3. CLS under 0.1.
4. Images are WebP/AVIF and lazy-loaded.
5. Compression (Brotli/Gzip) and cache headers are active.
6. Non-critical scripts load with defer/async.

Structured data and security

1. Organization or LocalBusiness schema is present.
2. Breadcrumb schema is used.
3. FAQ pages use FAQPage schema.
4. HSTS and basic security headers are set.
5. There are no broken internal links.
6. Open Graph and Twitter cards are defined.
7. llms.txt and suitable robots.txt rules exist for AI crawlers.

Crawl budget and large sites

On e-commerce and content sites with thousands of pages, Googlebot can't crawl everything often. Filter combinations, parameterized URLs, internal search results and duplicates waste crawl budget. Managing them with noindex, canonical or robots.txt rules gets important pages crawled faster.

JavaScript-rendered content

Google can run JavaScript, but does so in a second, delayed phase; many AI crawlers don't run it at all. Rendering main content, headings, links and structured data on the server (SSR/SSG) improves both indexing speed and GEO visibility.

Site migration checklist

1. Crawl and list every URL of the old site.
2. Map each old URL to its new counterpart and prepare a 301 redirect map.
3. Verify titles, descriptions and content are preserved on the new site.
4. After launch, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch the coverage report.
5. Track 404s and ranking changes for the first 4 weeks.

Which tools to use?

• Google Search Console: indexing, coverage and Core Web Vitals field data.
• PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse: speed and technical best practices.
• A crawler: broken links, redirects and duplicate content.
• Ovipu SEO Analysis, Schema Validator and Speed Test: free quick checks.