Technical SEO Checklist 2026: 20 Fixes That Move Rankings

Great content cannot rank if search engines cannot crawl, render or understand it. Technical SEO is the foundation everything else stands on. Here is the checklist our developers use when auditing websites.

Crawling and indexing

1. Check robots.txt. Make sure you are not accidentally blocking important pages or resources, and decide deliberately which AI crawlers to allow.
2. Submit an XML sitemap. Include only indexable, canonical URLs and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. Review index coverage. Find pages that are excluded, duplicated or erroring in Search Console.
4. Remove accidental noindex tags. These often survive from staging sites.
5. Fix broken links and 404s. Redirect valuable broken URLs to the most relevant page.

Site structure

6. Keep important pages close to the homepage. Key pages should be reachable within a few clicks.
7. Use descriptive, consistent URLs. Short, readable, lowercase and hyphenated.
8. Build strong internal links. Link related pages with descriptive anchor text.
9. Add breadcrumbs. They help users and search engines understand hierarchy.

Duplicate content

10. Set canonical tags. Tell search engines which version of a page is the main one.
11. Choose one domain version. Redirect http to https and www to non-www, or the reverse, consistently.
12. Avoid thin, near-duplicate pages. Mass-produced pages with only a city name changed can hurt the whole site.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

13. Optimize Largest Contentful Paint. Compress and correctly size hero images, use modern formats and fast hosting.
14. Improve Interaction to Next Paint. Reduce heavy JavaScript and long tasks.
15. Prevent layout shift. Set image dimensions and reserve space for embeds and ads.
16. Use caching and a CDN. Serve assets from locations close to visitors.

Rendering and markup

17. Make key content server-rendered. Important text and links should be in the HTML, not only loaded by JavaScript, since many crawlers, including AI crawlers, do not run scripts fully.
18. Add structured data. Use Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList schema where relevant, and validate it.
19. Write unique titles and meta descriptions. Every indexable page needs its own.

Security and trust

20. Serve everything over HTTPS and add sensible security headers.

Bonus: AI search readiness

Consider publishing an llms.txt file that summarizes your site for AI systems, and make sure your business information is consistent everywhere. Read more in our generative engine optimization guide.

Need a technical SEO audit?

Our SEO services include a full technical audit, and because we are developers, we implement the fixes ourselves. For AI visibility, see our AI search optimization service.