Technical SEO checklist: 50 checks that are worth running
Fifty checks grouped by what they protect, each with how to verify it and how much it actually matters. Not everything on this list deserves your afternoon.
Entrovix AIAug 12, 2026 14 min read
Technical SEO checklist: 50 checks that are worth running
Technical SEO checklists have a habit of treating every item as equally urgent, which is how people end up adding structured data to a site that has a noindex tag in production.
These fifty are grouped by the stage they protect: reaching your pages, keeping them, understanding them, serving them, and noticing when something breaks. Each one says how much it matters, and several say that the honest answer is not very much.
How to read the priority column
| Rating | Means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Broken, this removes pages from search. Check it today. |
| High | A measurable loss. Worth fixing this month. |
| Medium | A genuine improvement with a modest return. |
| Low | Correct to do, rarely the reason anything changed. |
1. Crawling: can Google reach the pages?
Nine checks. If any of the critical ones fail, nothing further down this page will help you.
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | robots.txt exists and returns 200 | Visit /robots.txt directly. A 500 error can be treated as a block | Critical |
| 2 | No Disallow: / left over from staging | Read the file. This single line removes a whole site | Critical |
| 3 | CSS and JavaScript are not blocked | Google needs them to render the page as a user sees it | High |
| 4 | An XML sitemap exists | Visit /sitemap.xml, and check Search Console has it | High |
| 5 | The sitemap is referenced in robots.txt | A Sitemap: line with an absolute URL | Medium |
| 6 | The sitemap lists only indexable 200 URLs | No redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages | High |
| 7 | Correct status codes | Missing pages return 404 or 410, not a 200 with an error message on it | High |
| 8 | No redirect chains | Each redirect should reach its destination in one hop | Medium |
| 9 | No redirect loops | A loop makes the page unreachable entirely | Critical |
2. Indexing: will Google keep them?
Eight checks. This is where the expensive, invisible mistakes live, because a page can look perfect and still be excluded by one attribute.
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | No stray noindex in production | View source, search for noindex | Critical |
| 11 | No X-Robots-Tag noindex header | Check response headers, not the HTML. Invisible in the source | Critical |
| 12 | Each page has a self-referencing canonical | It should name its own URL | High |
| 13 | Canonicals are absolute URLs | Relative canonicals get misinterpreted | Medium |
| 14 | Exactly one canonical per page | Two canonicals means Google ignores both | High |
| 15 | Parameter URLs are not generating duplicates | Filters and sorts creating thousands of URLs | High |
| 16 | Pagination is handled coherently | Page 2 should not canonicalise to page 1 | Medium |
| 17 | Search Console Pages report reviewed | Compare indexed against not-indexed and read the reasons | Critical |
3. URLs and architecture
Eight checks. Mostly one-off decisions that are painful to change later and cheap to get right at the start.
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | One canonical version of the site | http, https, www and non-www should all redirect to one | Critical |
| 19 | HTTPS with a valid certificate | Check the expiry date, and that renewal is automated | Critical |
| 20 | No mixed content | An https page loading http assets | High |
| 21 | Consistent trailing-slash policy | Both versions resolving separately is duplication | Medium |
| 22 | Readable URLs | Lowercase, hyphenated, no session identifiers | Medium |
| 23 | Important pages within three clicks of home | Depth correlates with how often a page is crawled | Medium |
| 24 | No orphan pages | A page linked from nowhere is barely a page | High |
| 25 | Breadcrumbs where a hierarchy genuinely exists | Do not invent one for markup's sake | Low |
4. On-page structure
Nine checks. This is the part every audit tool is good at, which is why it tends to be over-represented in reports and over-weighted in effort.
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | Every page has a unique title | Duplicates across a site are a common template fault | High |
| 27 | Titles front-load the meaningful words | Roughly 60 characters show; put the point first | High |
| 28 | Meta descriptions present and distinct | Not a ranking factor. It is the advertisement for the click | Medium |
| 29 | One H1 per page | Matching what the page is actually about | Medium |
| 30 | Heading levels are not skipped | H2 to H4 with no H3 is a structure problem and an accessibility one | Medium |
| 31 | Internal anchor text describes the destination | Click here tells a reader and a crawler nothing | Medium |
| 32 | Images have meaningful alt text | Describe the image. Decorative images take an empty alt | Medium |
| 33 | Images have width and height attributes | This is what prevents layout shift | High |
| 34 | The page declares its language | A lang attribute on the html element | Low |
5. Rendering and performance
Eight checks. Measure the field data rather than the lab score. Core Web Vitals are assessed from real visits at the 75th percentile over a rolling 28 days, which is why a good PageSpeed score and a failing metric can coexist.
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 35 | Content is in the server HTML | Compare view-source with the rendered page | High |
| 36 | Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5s or less | Field data in Search Console, not the lab score | High |
| 37 | Interaction to Next Paint at 200ms or less | Usually third-party JavaScript when it fails | Medium |
| 38 | Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less | Almost always images or ads without reserved space | High |
| 39 | Images sized to their display size | A 4000px image in a 600px column is the usual fault | High |
| 40 | Modern image formats | WebP or AVIF, typically a quarter to a third smaller | Medium |
| 41 | font-display set on web fonts | Otherwise text stays invisible while the font loads | Medium |
| 42 | Cache headers on static assets | Repeat visits should not re-download unchanged files | Medium |
If several of these fail at once, the cause is usually one thing rather than eight. Why your website is slow works through the four underlying causes and which fix belongs to which.
6. Structured data and sharing
Six checks, and one deletion. Structured data is worth adding where it describes something genuinely on the page, and worth ignoring where the feature it targeted no longer exists.
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 43 | Structured data validates | Google's Rich Results Test, or the Schema Markup Validator | Medium |
| 44 | Markup matches the visible content | Marking up a rating that is not on the page is a policy violation | High |
| 45 | Organization and WebSite markup, once | Site-wide, not repeated per page with different values | Low |
| 46 | Breadcrumb markup where breadcrumbs exist | One of the few types that still produces a visible result | Low |
| 47 | Open Graph tags for shared links | Title, description and image | Medium |
| 48 | og:image exists and is reachable | 1200x630 is the size everything is designed around | Medium |
The deletion: FAQ markup added for rich results is no longer doing that job. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026 and has withdrawn support for the feature. The markup remains valid and harmless, so there is no urgency to remove it, but adding it now for search appearance is work with no destination. HowTo rich results went the same way back in 2023.
7. Security and monitoring
| # | Check | How to verify | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 49 | Security response headers present | HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, a Content-Security-Policy | Medium |
| 50 | Search Console connected and actually read | Monthly: indexing errors, manual actions, sudden drops | Critical |
What is deliberately not on this list
Four things that appear on most checklists and have not earned their place.
- Keyword density. There is no target figure. Writing to hit one makes the page worse.
- The meta keywords tag. Unused by Google for well over a decade.
- A perfect PageSpeed score. The lab number is a diagnostic, not the thing being assessed.
- Submitting your site to search engines. Google finds sites by following links; paid submission services sell nothing.
A sensible cadence
| When | What to run |
|---|---|
| Monthly | Item 50, plus a glance at indexed page count and any new 404s |
| Quarterly | Sections 1 and 2 in full |
| Annually | The whole list |
| After any deploy that touches URLs | Sections 1, 2 and 3, immediately |
That last row is the one that matters most. Redesigns and migrations cause more sudden traffic losses than algorithm updates do, and the cause is almost always an unfinished redirect map. How to run an SEO audit covers the full process, and if you would rather work from symptoms than from a list, start with why a page is not ranking.