The technical SEO checklist that actually matters
Most technical SEO checklists are bloated with things that don't move the needle. Here's the short list that does - the items we check on every audit.
Why most checklists waste your time
There are technical SEO checklists with 80+ items on them. They’re thorough. They’re also useless, because they treat everything as equally important. Fixing a missing hreflang tag on a single-language site is not the same as fixing a crawl budget problem that’s keeping half your pages out of the index.
This is the short list. The things we actually check first on every audit, because they’re the ones that move rankings.
Crawlability and indexation
If Google can’t find the page, nothing else matters. This is always step one.
Your robots.txt should be allowing what you want indexed and blocking what you don’t. Your sitemap should reflect reality - not a list of URLs generated two years ago that includes pages you’ve since deleted. And your internal linking should make it possible to reach every important page within three clicks of the homepage.
Core Web Vitals
These aren’t just ranking factors. They’re the difference between a page that feels fast and a page that makes someone leave. LCP under 2.5 seconds. CLS under 0.1. INP under 200ms.
The rest is context
Everything after crawlability and performance depends on your specific site. A large e-commerce site has different technical priorities than a five-page service business. That’s why this is a checklist, not a playbook.