You can write the best content in your industry and still fail to rank if your site has technical SEO problems. Google needs to be able to find your pages, crawl them, understand their structure, and load them quickly. When any of those steps break down, rankings suffer.
This checklist covers 15 technical fixes that consistently have the most impact. Work through them in order — the items at the top are foundational, and everything downstream depends on them.
Crawlability: Make Sure Google Can Find Your Pages
1. Audit Your robots.txt File
Your robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they’re allowed to visit. A misconfigured robots.txt is one of the most common reasons pages don’t appear in search results — and one of the easiest to overlook.
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check:
- You haven’t accidentally blocked
Disallow: /(which blocks everything) - Your important pages and directories are not disallowed
- Your sitemap URL is declared at the bottom:
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
2. Submit and Validate Your XML Sitemap
Your XML sitemap is a roadmap that helps Googlebot discover all your important pages. Without one, new pages can take weeks to get indexed.
Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console under Indexing > Sitemaps. Check that it returns no errors and that the number of submitted URLs roughly matches the number of pages you want indexed. See our complete guide on XML sitemaps for step-by-step setup instructions.
3. Check for Crawl Errors in Search Console
Open Google Search Console and navigate to Indexing > Pages. Look for pages with status “Not indexed” and investigate why. Common issues include:
- “Crawled — currently not indexed” (Google found the page but chose not to index it)
- “Discovered — currently not indexed” (Googlebot hasn’t crawled it yet)
- “Page with redirect” (sending signals to a redirected URL)
4. Fix Broken Internal Links (4xx Errors)
Broken internal links waste crawl budget and create a poor user experience. Use Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit to identify any internal links pointing to 404 pages and update or remove them.
Page Speed: Pass Core Web Vitals
5. Measure Your Core Web Vitals
Google PageSpeed Insights gives you a free performance report for any URL. Run it on your homepage, your top landing pages, and any pages you’re trying to rank. Pay attention to your three Core Web Vitals scores:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how fast your main content loads
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the page jumps around while loading
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how responsive the page feels to user input
A score of 90+ on PageSpeed Insights is a good target. For deeper guidance on each metric, see our article on Core Web Vitals.
6. Compress and Convert Images to WebP
Images are typically the largest files on any web page. Compress all images to under 200KB and convert them to WebP format (25–35% smaller than JPEG with equivalent quality). Add loading="lazy" to below-the-fold images.
7. Enable Browser Caching and Compression
Configure your server to:
- Enable Gzip or Brotli compression for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
- Set appropriate cache-control headers so returning visitors don’t have to re-download static assets
Most caching plugins (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache) handle this automatically for WordPress sites.
8. Minify CSS and JavaScript
Remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, and characters from your CSS and JS files. This is a minor gain on its own but adds up alongside other speed improvements. Most page builder tools and performance plugins include minification options.
Indexation: Control What Google Indexes
9. Audit Canonical Tags
Canonical tags (<link rel="canonical" href="...">) tell Google which version of a URL is the “official” one. Check that:
- Every page has a canonical tag pointing to itself (or to the correct canonical version)
- You’re not canonicalizing important pages to other pages unintentionally
- Paginated pages use canonical tags correctly
10. Use noindex Correctly — and Sparingly
The noindex directive tells Google not to include a page in its index. Use it for thin or duplicate content pages (tag archives, search result pages, thank-you pages), but audit your use carefully. Many sites accidentally noindex pages they actually want to rank.
In Google Search Console, check the “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” section to verify the right pages are excluded.
11. Handle Duplicate Content with Redirects
If you have multiple URLs serving the same content (e.g., http:// vs https://, www vs non-www, trailing slash vs no trailing slash), set up 301 redirects to consolidate them into a single canonical URL.
Site Structure: Help Google Understand Your Site
12. Switch to HTTPS
If your site is still on HTTP, this is urgent. HTTPS has been a confirmed Google ranking signal since 2014, and modern browsers flag HTTP sites as “Not Secure.” Get an SSL certificate (Let’s Encrypt is free) and redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
13. Pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking. Run your key pages through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Common mobile issues include text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than the screen.
14. Add Schema Markup to Key Pages
Schema markup is structured data code that helps Google understand your content well enough to display rich snippets — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, how-to steps — in search results. These dramatically improve click-through rates.
Priority pages for schema: articles, product pages, local business pages, FAQ sections. Use Google’s Rich Results Test to validate your markup before deploying.
15. Fix Internal Linking Gaps
Internal links pass authority around your site and help Google understand the relationship between your pages. Run a crawl with Screaming Frog and look for:
- Orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them
- Deep pages — important pages more than 3 clicks from the homepage
- Pages with too few internal links — especially your most important landing pages
Build a deliberate internal linking strategy that connects related content and channels authority to your highest-priority pages.
Work through this list systematically and you’ll fix the technical issues holding back most websites. None of these items require advanced development skills — they just require attention.
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