The technical SEO checklist for launching a new website

Technical SEO is the groundwork that lets search engines find, understand and index your pages. It is not glamorous, and most visitors will never notice it, but mistakes here can keep a beautiful new site invisible for months.

Use this checklist before launch, then again a week after.

Access and indexing

• No stray noindex tags. Development sites are often set to “discourage search engines”. Make sure that setting is off on the live site.
• A sensible robots.txt. It should allow crawling of your public pages and point to your sitemap. Block only genuinely private areas such as admin or checkout steps.
• An XML sitemap listing the pages you want indexed, and only those: no redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages.
• Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools set up and verified, with the sitemap submitted.

One domain, on HTTPS

• Install an SSL certificate and serve every page over HTTPS.
• Choose one version of your address, for example https://example.com, and 301-redirect http:// and www. variations to it.
• Check there are no “mixed content” warnings from images or scripts still loading over HTTP.

Clean URLs and canonicals

• Use short, readable, lowercase URLs with hyphens, such as /services/web-design/.
• Add a self-referencing canonical tag on each page so duplicate versions (with tracking parameters, for example) consolidate to one URL.
• Make sure filters, sorting options and internal search results do not create thousands of thin, indexable URLs.

On-page essentials

• A unique title tag on every page, roughly 50–60 characters, leading with what the page is about.
• A meta description that summarises the page and gives people a reason to click. It is not a ranking factor, but it shapes the search snippet.
• One H1 per page, followed by logical H2 and H3 subheadings.
• Descriptive alt text on meaningful images.
• Internal links so every important page can be reached within a few clicks from the homepage.

Speed and mobile

• Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so check every template on a real phone.
• Compress images, serve modern formats and lazy-load anything below the first screen.
• Run key templates through PageSpeed Insights and fix anything marked poor for Core Web Vitals.

Structured data

Add schema markup where it applies: Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage, Product on product pages, Article on blog posts and BreadcrumbList for navigation. Validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Error handling

• A helpful custom 404 page that returns a real 404 status code.
• No internal links pointing at redirects or broken pages.
• Redirects that go straight to the final URL in one hop, never in chains or loops.

After launch

A week in, open the Pages report in Search Console. Look for pages that are “Discovered – currently not indexed” or excluded for unexpected reasons, and use the URL Inspection tool to check how Google sees your most important pages. Then set a monthly reminder to review coverage, Core Web Vitals and crawl errors. Technical SEO is not a one-off job, but once the foundations are right, keeping it healthy takes very little time.