Technical SEO Checklist: 25 Points for Site Health
Technical SEO problems can stop even great content from performing. Here is a practical 25-point checklist covering crawling, indexing, structure, performance and structured data.
No matter how good your content is, you will not see results if search engines cannot reach or understand your pages. Technical SEO covers that groundwork. You can run through the 25 points below in order, using Google Search Console and a crawling tool.
Crawling and indexing (1-7)
- A robots.txt file exists and does not block important pages.
- The XML sitemap is current and submitted to Search Console.
- The sitemap lists only pages that return a 200 status and that you want indexed.
- Unnecessary pages (filters, internal search results) use noindex or a suitable canonical.
- Each page canonical tag points to the correct address.
- The "Not indexed" reasons in Search Console have been reviewed.
- Important pages are reachable from the main menu within a few clicks.
Structure and URLs (8-14)
- The site opens in a single version: other https and www variants redirect with a 301 according to your preference.
- URLs are short, readable and written in lowercase.
- Broken internal links (404) have been cleaned up.
- Long redirect chains have been reduced to a single step.
- Each page has a single h1 and a logical heading hierarchy.
- Each page has a unique title and meta description.
- On multilingual sites, hreflang tags are reciprocal and correctly defined.
Performance and mobile (15-20)
- Pages display properly on mobile; text and buttons are comfortable to use.
- Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) are monitored in Search Console.
- Images are properly sized and served in a modern format such as WebP.
- Server response time is reasonable; caching is enabled where needed.
- Unused CSS and JavaScript have been reduced.
- If content appears only after JavaScript runs, it has been verified that search engines can render it.
For speed in depth, see the existing guides on our site; the goal here is simply to make sure it is not forgotten on the list.
Structured data and security (21-25)
- Suitable structured data for organization, local business, article or product has been added and tested.
- The site has a valid SSL certificate and no mixed content warnings.
- Search Console notifications for security issues and manual actions are being checked.
- Open Graph tags are defined for social sharing.
- The 404 page guides users and genuinely returns a 404 status code.
How to prioritize
Not all items carry the same weight. Tackle the problems that block indexing first (1-6), then redirects and broken links, and finally the fine-tuning items. Repeating the check every three months prevents big surprises.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is not a one-time job; new issues appear as a site grows. If you cannot work through the list on your own, take a look at our SEO service or get in touch.
