Technical SEO Checklist: 25 Must-Do Fixes

Crawling & Indexing

• 1. Check your robots.txt — Ensure you're not accidentally blocking important pages from being crawled. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt to inspect it.
• 2. Submit an XML sitemap — Create a sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console. Include only canonical, indexable URLs.
• 3. Fix crawl errors — Check the "Pages" report in Google Search Console for crawl errors and fix them promptly.
• 4. Ensure proper canonicalization — Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of duplicate or similar pages.
• 5. Audit noindex tags — Make sure important pages don't have noindex set unintentionally.

Site Speed & Core Web Vitals

• 6. Measure Core Web Vitals — Use Google PageSpeed Insights or Search Console's Core Web Vitals report to identify failing pages.
• 7. Enable compression — Gzip or Brotli compression reduces file sizes significantly. Verify it's enabled on your server.
• 8. Leverage browser caching — Set appropriate cache-control headers so returning visitors load pages faster.
• 9. Minify CSS, JS, and HTML — Remove unnecessary whitespace and comments from code files to reduce their size.
• 10. Optimise and compress images — Use WebP format and compress images with tools like Squoosh or Cloudinary.
• 11. Implement lazy loading — Load images and videos only when they enter the user's viewport.
• 12. Use a CDN — A content delivery network serves assets from servers closer to the user, reducing latency.

HTTPS & Security

• 13. Migrate to HTTPS — HTTPS is a confirmed ranking signal. Every site should be on HTTPS in 2025.
• 14. Fix mixed content warnings — After moving to HTTPS, ensure all page resources (images, scripts) load over HTTPS, not HTTP.
• 15. Redirect HTTP to HTTPS — Set up server-level 301 redirects from all HTTP URLs to their HTTPS equivalents.

URL & Redirect Management

• 16. Fix broken links (404s) — Identify and fix or redirect broken internal and external links. These create poor user experiences and waste crawl budget.
• 17. Fix redirect chains — All redirects should go directly to the final destination URL. Redirect chains slow crawling and dilute authority.
• 18. Standardise your preferred domain — Decide on www vs. non-www and redirect all variations to your canonical preference.
• 19. Fix duplicate content — Identical or very similar content on multiple URLs confuses Google. Use canonical tags or 301 redirects to consolidate.

Mobile & UX

• 20. Verify mobile-friendliness — Google uses mobile-first indexing. Test your site with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
• 21. Fix intrusive interstitials — Pop-ups that obstruct content on mobile can trigger a Google penalty. Ensure they're not blocking the main content on load.
• 22. Check font sizes and tap targets — Text should be readable without zooming, and buttons/links should be large enough to tap easily on mobile.

Structured Data

• 23. Implement structured data (Schema.org) — Add appropriate schema markup (Article, FAQ, HowTo, Review, BreadcrumbList) to help Google understand your content and earn rich results.
• 24. Validate your structured data — Use Google's Rich Results Test to check for errors in your schema markup.
• 25. Add BreadcrumbList schema — Breadcrumb rich results can appear in SERPs and improve click-through rates.