A technical SEO checklist is the list of things nobody sees on your website but Google notices on every visit. A consultant called us last spring, frustrated. She had written twelve solid articles about workplace safety, each one better than anything her competitors had published, and none of them showed up in search. The writing was fine. The problem was a single checkbox in WordPress, left ticked by the original developer, that told search engines to stay away from the whole site.
That’s an extreme case, but smaller versions are everywhere: a redirect that loops, a sitemap full of dead pages, two homepages competing. None of it is visible to a visitor, and all of it quietly costs you rankings. A technical SEO checklist is how you catch it.
This is the technical SEO checklist we run on every site that comes through Design Fly 24, whether we built it or inherited it. It’s written for consultants, experts and small firms, so it skips the enterprise stuff (log file analysis for a million pages, hreflang for twenty countries) and focuses on what actually breaks on a 20 to 60 page professional site.
- A technical SEO checklist answers three questions: can Google reach your pages, can it read them, and does it trust them enough to show them?
- Most technical problems on small sites come from a handful of causes: leftover settings, sloppy redirects, duplicate URLs and heavy themes.
- Google Search Console is free and shows you most of what you need. Check it monthly.
- Fix crawling and indexing issues first. Speed and structured data matter, but only once Google can see the page at all.
- You don’t need to be a developer to run this, but some fixes are worth handing to someone who is.
What a technical SEO checklist covers (and what it doesn’t)
SEO work splits roughly into three buckets. Content is what you say. On page work is how each page is labeled and structured (titles, headings, internal links). Technical SEO is the plumbing: how your server, your CMS and your code present the site to a search engine.
A technical SEO checklist lives in that third bucket. It won’t tell you what to write about, and it won’t fix a weak service page. For that, our on page SEO checklist and our guide to SEO for consultants are better places to start. What it will do is make sure the good work you put into content isn’t wasted.
Think of a speaking gig. The best keynote in the room means nothing if the microphone is off. A technical SEO checklist is checking the microphone.
Tools you need for this technical SEO checklist
- Google Search Console. Free, and the single most useful tool here. If you haven’t verified your site yet, set it up first and give it a few days to collect data.
- PageSpeed Insights. Also free, for speed and Core Web Vitals.
- A crawler. Screaming Frog’s free version handles up to 500 URLs, which covers almost every consultant site.
1. Crawlability: can Google reach your pages?
Crawling is Google’s bot following links from page to page and downloading what it finds. If a page can’t be crawled, it can’t rank. Simple as that.
The first item on any technical SEO checklist is making sure nothing blocks the bot. In WordPress, go to Settings, then Reading, and make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked. Developers often leave it ticked after building on a staging server.
Check your internal links
Google finds pages mostly through links. A page that nothing links to (an “orphan” page) may never get crawled, or may get crawled rarely. Every service page, every case study and every important article should be reachable from your menu, your footer or other pages within a few clicks of the homepage.
Run your crawler and compare what it finds against the pages you know exist. For a technical SEO checklist on a small site, this one comparison catches a lot.
2. Indexing: are the right pages in Google?
Crawling and indexing are different. Google can crawl a page and still decide not to add it to its index. This part of the technical SEO checklist is about making sure your important pages are in, and the junk is out.
Start with a quick sanity check. Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. It’s not precise, but if you have 40 pages and Google shows 4, or shows 400, something is off.
Then open the Pages report in Search Console. It splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed, with reasons. Those reasons drive this part of the technical SEO checklist.
Common reasons pages are left out
- Excluded by noindex tag. Fine for thank you pages and admin pages. A problem if it’s on a service page.
- Crawled, currently not indexed. Google saw it and wasn’t impressed. Usually a content quality or duplication issue, not a technical one.
- Duplicate without user selected canonical. Google found several versions of the same page and picked one itself. We’ll fix this in the canonicals section.
- Page with redirect. Normal for old URLs. Only worry if a page you want indexed shows up here.
For any single page you care about, paste its URL into the URL Inspection tool. It shows whether the page is indexed, which canonical Google chose and when it last crawled.
Thin and junk pages
WordPress creates pages you never asked for: tag archives, author archives, attachment pages for every image. On a small site they’re thin and repetitive. Set them to noindex in Rank Math or Yoast; every technical SEO checklist we run includes this step.
3. XML sitemaps
A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want search engines to know about. It doesn’t force Google to index anything, but it helps Google find pages faster and understand which ones you consider important.
Most WordPress SEO plugins generate one at /sitemap_index.xml or /sitemap.xml. Open it and look at what’s in there.
- It should list your real pages and posts.
- It should not list noindexed pages, redirected URLs, or pages that return errors.
- It should not include tag archives or attachment pages if you’ve set those to noindex.
Submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps and check the discovered count. Google’s own sitemap documentation is short and worth a read.
Quick tip: If your site runs on Squarespace, Wix or Webflow, the sitemap is created for you. Your job on this part of the technical SEO checklist is just to submit it and confirm the count looks right.
4. robots.txt
The robots.txt file sits at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and tells crawlers which parts of the site to stay out of. It’s a blunt tool, and on small sites the rule is: keep it simple.
A healthy robots.txt for a WordPress site is often three or four lines: block the admin area, allow the one admin file front end features need, point to your sitemap.
What to look for on this technical SEO checklist item
- A line that says
Disallow: /on its own. That blocks the entire site. If you see it on a live site, fix it today. - Blocked CSS or JavaScript folders. Google needs those to render your pages properly. Old advice used to block them; current advice is to leave them open.
- Using robots.txt to hide pages from search. This doesn’t work the way people think. A blocked page can still appear in results if other sites link to it. To keep a page out of the index, use a noindex tag instead.
Google’s robots.txt introduction explains the difference.
5. Canonical tags and duplicate URLs
Your homepage probably exists at four or more addresses: with and without www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash.
To Google, that could be several near identical pages competing. A canonical tag says “this is the main version.” Every technical SEO checklist worth using checks canonicals, because duplicate URLs split your ranking signals.
How to check canonicals
- Every indexable page should have a canonical tag pointing to itself (a “self referencing” canonical). SEO plugins handle this by default.
- Pick one version of your domain (we prefer https with no www, but either is fine) and make sure every other version redirects to it.
- In URL Inspection, compare “User declared canonical” with “Google selected canonical.” If they differ on an important page, Google disagrees with you, and you need to find out why.
Duplicate content also sneaks in through copied pages. Five location pages that differ only by city name may be treated as duplicates whatever your canonicals say.
6. Redirects and broken links
Every older site has old URLs. When a URL changes, the old one should send visitors and Google to the new one with a permanent (301) redirect.
This section of the technical SEO checklist is where redesigns go wrong most often. We’ve seen established experts lose half their search traffic after a relaunch because nobody mapped the old URLs to the new ones. If a redesign is on your calendar, read our website redesign checklist before anything goes live.
What to check
- Broken internal links. Your crawler will list every link that leads to a 404 page. Fix them at the source by updating the link, not just by adding a redirect.
- Redirect chains. Page A redirects to B, which redirects to C. Each hop slows things down and leaks a little value. Point A straight to C.
- Redirect loops. A goes to B, B goes back to A. The page never loads. Usually caused by conflicting plugin and server rules.
- Temporary (302) redirects used for permanent moves. Use 301 when the move is permanent.
A redesign without a redirect map isn’t a fresh start. It’s starting over from zero and calling it progress.
7. HTTPS and security basics
HTTPS has been a ranking signal for years, and browsers now flag sites without it as “Not secure.” For a consultant whose whole pitch is trust, that warning is a disaster before anyone reads a word.
Free SSL is standard now, so the certificate is rarely the issue. On our technical SEO checklist, the problems we find are around it:
- Mixed content. The page loads over https, but an image, font or script still loads over http. Browsers may block it or show a warning. Search your database for old http links to your own domain and update them.
- No redirect from http to https. Both versions load, which is the duplicate problem from section 5 all over again.
A hacked site can get flagged or dropped from results entirely. Our website security checklist covers the rest, and Search Console’s Security Issues report will tell you if Google has spotted anything.
Rather hand this list to someone else?We’ll run the full technical SEO checklist on your site and send you a plain English fix list, sorted by what matters most.
8. Site speed and Core Web Vitals
Google uses Core Web Vitals as part of ranking, and a slow site loses people. A procurement officer comparing three security consultants on her phone between meetings won’t wait for yours to load.
Run your homepage and your top service page through PageSpeed Insights. Focus on the mobile results and on three numbers:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how fast the main content appears. Usually a hero image or headline.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading.
The usual culprits on consultant sites
Oversized images are number one: a headshot uploaded straight from the photographer can be several megabytes. Next come bloated page builders, too many plugins and weak shared hosting.
For the full speed playbook, see website speed optimization. For this technical SEO checklist, the goal is simply to know where you stand and catch the obvious problems.
9. Mobile usability
Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. If a section is hidden on mobile, Google may not see it at all, which is why mobile sits on every technical SEO checklist.
Pull up your site on an actual phone and run this part of the technical SEO checklist:
- Text is readable without zooming.
- Buttons and links are big enough to tap and not crammed together.
- Pop ups don’t cover the whole page the moment it loads.
- The same important content appears on mobile as on desktop.
Our post on mobile friendly website design covers layout. For a technical SEO checklist, the point is content parity.
10. Structured data
Structured data (often called schema markup) is code that labels the information on your page in a format search engines understand. It says “this is a business, here’s its address,” or “this is an article, here’s the author and date.”
It isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it helps Google understand who you are. For consultants, the useful types are usually Organization or ProfessionalService, Person (for the expert behind the firm), Article for blog posts, and occasionally FAQ.
Test any page with Google’s Rich Results Test. It shows what structured data Google detects and flags errors. We cover the details in schema markup for small business, including how to add it on WordPress without touching code.
11. Search Console reports to check every month
A technical SEO checklist isn’t a one time project. Plugins update and pages get added in a hurry. Spend twenty minutes a month in Search Console on these:
Pages (Indexing)
Has the indexed count dropped? Are new pages showing as not indexed? This is the earliest warning a technical SEO checklist can give you.
Core Web Vitals and HTTPS
Look for URLs sliding from “Good” to “Poor,” often after a plugin update.
Enhancements and Manual actions
The Enhancements section lists any structured data Google found, with errors. Manual actions should always say “No issues detected.” If it doesn’t, stop everything else.
Performance
This is where you see the payoff. A page that starts collecting impressions after a fix is the best proof your technical SEO checklist work is paying off.
The full technical SEO checklist in one table
Here’s the whole technical SEO checklist condensed so you can print it or copy it into your own tracking sheet.
| Area | What to check | Where to check it | How often |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crawlability | No sitewide block, no orphan pages, real links in menus | WordPress settings, crawler | After launch, then quarterly |
| Indexing | Key pages indexed, junk pages set to noindex | Search Console Pages report | Monthly |
| XML sitemap | Lists only live, indexable pages; submitted | Browser, Search Console Sitemaps | Monthly |
| robots.txt | No accidental Disallow, CSS and JS not blocked | yourdomain.com/robots.txt | After any major change |
| Canonicals | Self referencing tags, one preferred domain version | URL Inspection, page source | Quarterly |
| Redirects | 301s for moved pages, no chains or loops | Crawler, redirect plugin | After any URL change |
| Broken links | No internal links to 404 pages | Crawler | Quarterly |
| HTTPS | Valid certificate, no mixed content, http redirects | Browser, Search Console HTTPS report | Monthly |
| Speed | LCP, INP and CLS in the good range on mobile | PageSpeed Insights, Core Web Vitals report | Monthly |
| Mobile | Readable, tappable, same content as desktop | Your phone | After design changes |
| Structured data | Valid markup for business, person, articles | Rich Results Test, Enhancements report | After template changes |
| Security | No manual actions or security issues | Search Console | Monthly |
If you only have an hour, do the first three rows of this technical SEO checklist. Those problems make everything else pointless.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run a technical SEO checklist?
Do a full pass once or twice a year and after any redesign, migration or host change. In between, a twenty minute monthly look at Search Console catches most new problems before they hurt you.
Can I run a technical SEO checklist myself if I’m not technical?
Mostly, yes. Checking Search Console, your sitemap, robots.txt and your phone needs no coding. Fixing redirect loops, mixed content or speed problems is where a developer usually earns their keep.
Is a technical SEO checklist the same as an SEO audit?
It’s one part of it. A full audit also looks at content, keywords, on page structure and backlinks. Our SEO audit checklist covers the wider review; this post goes deeper on the technical side.
Which item matters most?
Indexing. If your important pages aren’t in Google’s index, no amount of speed work or schema will help. Start there every time.
Do Squarespace and Wix sites need this too?
Yes, though the platform handles more for you. You’ll still want to check indexing, redirects after page changes, image sizes and mobile layout.
Want a second pair of eyes on your site?
Most consultants don’t need a 90 page audit report. They need someone to find the two or three things holding the site back and fix them. We run this technical SEO checklist on sites we build through our website design services, and we keep them healthy afterward with WordPress maintenance.
If you’ve been publishing good work and Google still acts like you don’t exist, the answer is often hiding in this technical SEO checklist. Get in touch with us and we’ll take a look. You can also browse sites we’ve built for consultants and experts across the US.
