Technical SEO Audit Checklist: What to Check and in What Order

A technical SEO audit checklist tells you whether Google can find, crawl, index and load your pages, and what to fix when it can’t. Great content won’t rank if Google can’t reach it, and a slow or broken page loses visitors even when it does rank. The checklist below works through the site in order, from the foundations up.

You can run most of these checks yourself with free tools. Each section says which tool to use and what a problem looks like. If you want a printable version, our free SEO cheat sheet covers the essentials on one page.

Tools you need

You don’t need paid software to start. These cover almost everything on the list:

• Google Search Console. Free. Shows which pages are indexed, why others aren’t, Core Web Vitals from real visitors, and manual actions.
• PageSpeed Insights. Free. Tests a single URL for speed and shows field data from real Chrome users when there is enough traffic.
• A site crawler. Several crawlers have a free tier for small sites. A crawler visits every link on your site like a search engine would, and lists status codes, titles, canonicals and redirects.
• Your browser. View the page source and use a mobile view to see what visitors and Google actually get.

The checklist at a glance

Work top to bottom. Earlier items block later ones: there is no point tuning speed on a page Google can’t index.

#	Check	Where to look	What a problem looks like
1	robots.txt	yoursite.com/robots.txt	Important folders blocked with Disallow
2	XML sitemap	Search Console, Sitemaps report	Sitemap missing, erroring, or listing redirected or noindexed URLs
3	Indexing	Search Console, Pages report	Key pages under “Not indexed”
4	noindex tags	Page source, crawler	noindex on pages you want found
5	Status codes	Crawler	404s linked internally, 5xx server errors
6	Redirects	Crawler	Chains (A to B to C), loops, temporary redirects that should be permanent
7	Canonical tags	Page source, crawler	Missing, pointing to the wrong page, or conflicting with redirects
8	HTTPS	Browser, crawler	Mixed content, HTTP pages still live, both www and non-www versions loading
9	Core Web Vitals	Search Console, PageSpeed Insights	Pages marked “Poor” or “Needs improvement”
10	Mobile layout	Phone, PageSpeed Insights	Text too small, buttons too close, content wider than the screen
11	Site structure	Crawler	Important pages more than three or four clicks from the home page, orphan pages
12	Titles and meta descriptions	Crawler	Missing, duplicated or cut off
13	Headings	Page source	No H1, several H1s, or headings used for styling only
14	Images	Crawler, PageSpeed Insights	Huge files, missing alt text, no width and height set
15	Structured data	Rich Results Test	Errors, or schema describing content not on the page

Crawling: can Google reach your pages?

robots.txt tells crawlers which parts of the site not to visit. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read it. A single line like Disallow: / blocks the whole site, and it is a common leftover from a staging site that went live. Make sure CSS and JavaScript files aren’t blocked either, since Google needs them to render the page.

The XML sitemap lists the pages you want indexed. Submit it in Search Console and check the report for errors. It should list only live, canonical pages that return a 200 status: no redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages. Google’s documentation (Search Central, updated 8 July 2026) says a single sitemap is limited to 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs. Larger sites split it into several files with a sitemap index.

Indexing: are the right pages in Google?

Open the Pages report in Search Console. It lists every URL Google knows about and the reason each unindexed page was left out. Some reasons are fine, such as a page that redirects or a duplicate with a correct canonical. Others need action:

• Excluded by noindex tag on a page you want found. Remove the tag.
• Crawled, currently not indexed. Google saw the page and chose not to index it. Often a thin or near-duplicate page. Improve it, merge it, or remove it.
• Not found (404) for a page that should exist. Restore it or redirect it to the closest match.
• Server error (5xx). Talk to your host. Repeated server errors slow down crawling across the site.

Also check canonical tags. Each page should point its canonical to itself, unless it is a true duplicate of another page. Filtered category pages on online stores are the usual trouble spot.

Site health: status codes, redirects and HTTPS

Run a crawler over the whole site and sort by status code.

• Fix internal links to 404 pages. Point them at the right page, rather than relying on a redirect.
• Shorten redirect chains. If page A redirects to B and B to C, change A to go straight to C.
• Use permanent (301) redirects for pages that have moved for good.
• Pick one version of the site. Only one of https://yoursite.com and https://www.yoursite.com should load. The other should redirect to it, and every HTTP URL should redirect to HTTPS.

After a redesign or a move to a new platform, this section matters most. Old URLs that now return 404 lose whatever rankings they had.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google’s measures of loading, responsiveness and visual stability, based on real visits. Google Search Central (page updated 10 December 2025) lists the targets for a good experience:

Metric	What it measures	Good
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)	How fast the main content loads	Within 2.5 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)	How fast the page responds to taps and clicks	Less than 200 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)	How much the layout jumps while loading	Less than 0.1

Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console first. It groups pages by template, so one fix to a product page template can fix hundreds of URLs. Common causes of poor scores:

• Large hero images that aren’t compressed or served in modern formats like WebP or AVIF
• Images and ads without set dimensions, which push content down as they load
• Too many plugins or third-party scripts: chat widgets, trackers, sliders
• Slow or overloaded hosting

Mobile and page structure

Google mainly uses the mobile version of your site for indexing. Open your key pages on a real phone. Check that text is readable without zooming, buttons are easy to tap, nothing scrolls sideways, and the mobile page has the same content as the desktop page.

Then look at internal links. Important pages should be reachable within a few clicks from the home page, and every page should have at least one internal link pointing to it. A crawler shows “orphan” pages with no internal links, and pages buried deep in the structure. Linking from a service hub to each service page, and back, is a simple fix that helps both visitors and crawlers.

Finish with on-page basics: one clear H1 per page, a unique title and meta description for each page, and descriptive alt text on images.

Structured data

Schema markup describes your content to search engines in a fixed format: your organization, products, articles, FAQs or local business details. Test key pages with Google’s Rich Results Test and fix any errors. Only mark up what is visible on the page. Review stars or ratings that don’t come from real, shown reviews break Google’s guidelines.

The next step

Start with Search Console’s Pages report. It shows the biggest problems on most sites in a few minutes. If you would rather hand the audit over, see what our technical SEO service covers, or keep the one-page SEO cheat sheet next to you while you work. For the full picture, browse our SEO services or the rest of the blog.