The technical SEO checklist we run on every site in 2026

Great content can't rank if search engines struggle to crawl it. Before we write a single keyword brief, we run this checklist.

Can Google reach every page?

• A clean robots.txt that doesn't block CSS or JS
• An XML sitemap listing only canonical, indexable URLs
• No orphan pages — every page is linked from somewhere

Is each page the only version of itself?

Duplicate URLs split ranking signals. Every page gets a self-referencing canonical, and trailing slashes, www and HTTP variants all redirect to one version.

Quick test — Search for site:yourdomain.com and scan for duplicates, staging URLs or parameters that shouldn't be indexed.

Is it fast on a real phone?

Core Web Vitals are measured on real users' devices. We focus on the three that matter: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS).

1. Serve images in modern formats at the size they're displayed
2. Load fonts with a fallback so text shows immediately
3. Reserve space for anything that loads late, so nothing jumps

Does Google understand what the page is?

Structured data turns a page into facts: an organisation, a product, an FAQ, an article. It doesn't guarantee rich results, but it removes the guesswork.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Your Business",
  "address": { "addressLocality": "Kolkata" }
}

Technical SEO isn't a ranking trick — it's removing reasons not to rank you.