In this guide
You do not need an SEO agency to get the technical basics right. This checklist covers what search engines need from any website, in the order that matters, and each step points to a free check you can run on your own site in minutes.
Key takeaways
- Technical SEO makes sure search engines can reach, read and index your pages; content then does the ranking.
- Start with access (robots.txt, noindex, status codes), then structure (sitemap, canonicals, redirects), then page tags.
- Fix problems that affect every page (templates, menus) before one-off pages.
- Re-check after every redesign, migration or plugin change, when most problems appear.
1. Can search engines reach your pages?
- robots.txt does not block important pages or the whole site (a leftover from a staging site is common).
- Pages answer 200, not 404, 500 or a redirect.
- No accidental noindex in a tag, an SEO plugin setting or an X-Robots-Tag header.
2. Is the structure clear?
- One version of the site: https, with or without www, all others redirecting there in one hop.
- An XML sitemap with the pages you want found, listed in robots.txt.
- Canonical tags that point to the page itself, except for deliberate duplicates.
- Internal links to every important page, so none is an orphan.
4. Is it fast and stable?
- Core Web Vitals pass on mobile for your main page templates.
- Images are compressed and sized for phones.
- The HTTPS certificate is valid and renews automatically.
5. Keep it that way
Most technical SEO problems are introduced, not inherited: a plugin update adds noindex, a redesign drops redirects, a migration changes URLs. A weekly crawl and a daily watch catch these within a day instead of months later, when traffic has already fallen.
Checklist
- Run a full website health check and fix every problem it reports.
- Confirm robots.txt does not block pages you want in search.
- Make sure the sitemap lists only final, indexable addresses.
- Check that every page has one title, one description and a correct canonical.
- Remove redirect chains and broken links.
- Test the home page and top pages for speed on mobile.
- Set up monitoring so the next regression is caught the same day.
Questions
How often should I run a technical SEO check?
After every significant change, and otherwise weekly. Monitoring that crawls the site each week does this without anyone remembering to.
What should I fix first?
Anything that blocks indexing (robots.txt, noindex, errors) and anything in a template that repeats on every page. One fix there helps hundreds of pages.