Search visibility depends on more than keywords. If pages load slowly, break on mobile or are hard for search engines to crawl, even excellent content struggles to rank. This checklist covers the technical foundations every business website should get right.
1. Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google measures real-world loading, responsiveness and visual stability through Core Web Vitals. You can check yours in PageSpeed Insights or in Search Console.
- Serve images in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, sized for the space they occupy.
- Lazy-load images below the fold, and give every image a width and height to prevent layout shifts.
- Remove plugins and scripts you no longer use; each one adds weight.
- Use page caching and a content delivery network for visitors in other regions.
- Load fonts efficiently and limit the number of font weights.
2. Mobile layout
Most visitors arrive on a phone, and search engines index the mobile version of your site. Check that text is readable without zooming, buttons are easy to tap, menus work with one hand and no content scrolls sideways.
3. Indexing and crawling
- Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console and check it for errors.
- Make sure important pages are not blocked by robots.txt or marked noindex.
- Give every page one canonical URL, especially if it can be reached through several addresses.
- Fix broken links and redirect old URLs to their closest replacements with 301 redirects.
4. Page structure
Each page should have a single main heading, followed by logical subheadings. Title tags should be unique and describe the page, and meta descriptions should summarize it in a way that encourages the click. Clean, readable URLs help both visitors and search engines.
5. Structured data
Structured data in JSON-LD format helps search engines understand your business, services, articles and FAQs. Organization, Service, Article, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage markup are the most useful for business sites, and they can make your results more informative in search.
6. Internal linking
Link related pages to each other with descriptive anchor text. Service pages should link to relevant articles, and articles should link back to the services they relate to. This spreads authority across the site and keeps visitors moving to useful pages.
7. Security and trust
Serve every page over HTTPS, keep WordPress, themes and plugins updated, and make contact details, policies and pricing easy to find. These signals matter to visitors as much as to search engines.
8. Measure, then repeat
Set up Google Analytics and Search Console, note your current performance, and recheck after each round of changes. Technical SEO is not a one-time task; small regressions creep in as content and plugins are added.
If you would like a site built on these foundations from day one, see our website development service.