Technical SEO Checklist I Use Before Any Site Goes Live

Crawlability

• robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking pages that should be indexed
• XML sitemap is generated and submitted to Search Console
• No orphaned pages — every important page is reachable through internal links

Speed

• Images compressed and served in modern formats
• CSS and JS bundled and minified, nothing render-blocking unnecessarily
• Caching configured at the server level, not left to defaults

Structured data

• Schema markup added for the content types that support it (articles, products, FAQs)
• Markup validated before launch, not assumed to be correct

On-page basics

• Meta titles and descriptions written for every page, sized correctly
• Heading structure is logical, not just styled to look right

None of this is complicated on its own — the value is in actually running through it every time instead of assuming last project's setup carried over.