Technical SEO Checklist: 15 Fixes for a Fast, Crawlable Website
The engine room of SEO. Fifteen practical fixes that help Google crawl, index and love your website.
By Mohamed Abdelkhalk
Published
· Updated
Great content cannot rank if search engines struggle to reach it. This technical SEO checklist covers the foundations every website needs — whether it runs on WordPress, a custom PHP build like this journal, or anything else.
Crawling and indexing
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. They are your direct line to the search engines.
- Submit an XML sitemap that lists only real, indexable pages. This site generates one automatically at
/sitemap.xml. - Check robots.txt — block admin areas, never your important content or CSS/JS files.
- Use canonical tags to tell Google the preferred URL when similar pages exist.
- Fix broken links and 404s, and use 301 redirects when you move or rename a page.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google measures real-user experience with Core Web Vitals. Aim for these “good” thresholds:
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Loading of the main content | ≤ 2.5 s |
| INP | Responsiveness to interactions | ≤ 200 ms |
| CLS | Visual stability (layout shifts) | ≤ 0.1 |
- Compress images and serve modern formats like WebP; always set width and height.
- Lazy-load images and videos below the fold.
- Enable caching and compression (gzip or Brotli) on the server.
- Minimise heavy scripts — every third-party widget costs speed.
Security and mobile
- Use HTTPS everywhere and redirect HTTP and www versions to one canonical domain.
- Design mobile-first. Google indexes the mobile version of your pages.
Structure and international SEO
- Clean URLs: short, lowercase, with words, e.g.
/en/blog/technical-seo-checklist. - Breadcrumbs and internal links so every page is reachable within a few clicks.
- Structured data (schema markup) for articles, videos, breadcrumbs and your organisation. See our schema guide.
- hreflang tags for multilingual sites, so Arabic users get the Arabic page and English users get the English one.
Built in This journal already ships with HTTPS redirects, a dynamic sitemap with hreflang, canonical tags, breadcrumbs, JSON-LD schema, lazy-loading and a 404 monitor in the dashboard.
How to use this technical SEO checklist
Run your homepage and key pages through PageSpeed Insights, review the Pages and Core Web Vitals reports in Search Console, and use the page audit tool inside our dashboard to check titles, headings and schema. Then fix the biggest problems first.
New to all this? Start with what is SEO.
Frequently asked questions
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is optimising the infrastructure of a website — speed, crawlability, indexing, security and structured data — so search engines can access and understand it.
Do Core Web Vitals affect rankings?
They are part of Google’s page experience signals. They rarely beat relevance, but a fast site helps users and can be a tiebreaker.
