Technical SEO Checklist 2026

01Why Does Technical SEO Come First?

Technical SEO is the road that gets your content to Google. If the road is closed, even the best-written page won't show up in search results. Crawl blocks, wrong canonical tags or endless redirect loops can waste all of your content effort.

The good news is that technical problems are often fixed once and keep paying off. That is why the first job when starting a new SEO project is to check the list below on your site, one item at a time. We summarized the other pillars of SEO in our what is SEO guide.

Two tools are enough to work through the list: Google Search Console and your browser's developer tools. For the meaning and fixes of the warnings you see in Search Console, check our Search Console errors article.

02Crawling: Can Google Reach the Site?

Googlebot reaches your site by following links and reads the robots.txt file first. A block at this stage makes every later check meaningless, which is why the list starts with crawling.

• The robots.txt file sits at the root of the domain (/robots.txt) and doesn't block important pages.
• The "block everything" rule added while the site was being rebuilt was removed after going live.
• CSS and JavaScript files are not blocked; Google can render the page the way users see it.
• There are no broken internal links (404); menu and content links go to working URLs.
• Important pages are only a few clicks from the homepage; no page is left without internal links (orphaned).
• Server errors (5xx) are low in the Search Console crawl stats.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sepet/
Disallow: /hesabim/

Sitemap: https://www.ornek.com/sitemap.xml

03Indexing and the Sitemap

A sitemap tells Google which pages you care about, but it doesn't guarantee indexing. For a page to be indexed, its content must also be sufficient and original.

• The XML sitemap contains only URLs that return a 200 status code, are canonical and are meant to be indexed.
• The sitemap has been submitted to Search Console and is referenced in robots.txt.
• Pages that shouldn't be indexed (thank-you pages, filters, search results) are marked noindex.
• In the page indexing report in Search Console, the "Crawled - currently not indexed" count is at a reasonable level.
• Thin and nearly empty pages have either been merged or improved.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.ornek.com/hizmetler/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-01-15</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

04Canonical Tag and Duplicate Content

If the same content can be opened from more than one URL, Google decides on its own which one to show. The canonical tag states your preferred URL explicitly and prevents ranking signals from being split.

• Every page has a self-referencing canonical tag.
• Of the www and non-www, http and https, and trailing-slash and no-slash versions, only one is live; the others redirect with a 301.
• E-commerce URLs with filter and sort parameters point their canonical to the main category.
• The canonical URL is not noindex, doesn't redirect and returns 200.
• On multilingual sites, hreflang tags are defined reciprocally and with the correct language codes.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ornek.com/hizmetler/">

05Redirects and Status Codes

Site redesigns and URL changes are the events that lose the most traffic in technical SEO. The visitors and link value that reach old URLs must be passed to the new URL with a 301 permanent redirect. We covered the most common causes of sudden traffic drops separately in our site traffic dropped article.

• 301, not 302, is used for permanent moves.
• There are no redirect chains: not A to B and B to C, but A straight to C.
• Deleted pages with no equivalent return 404 or 410; they are not all redirected to the homepage.
• A custom 404 page guides the user to a search box and the main categories.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.ornek.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect 301 /eski-sayfa/ https://www.ornek.com/yeni-sayfa/

06Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google uses three core metrics to measure page experience. Meeting these thresholds in field data (real users) is required for a "good" assessment.

• Images are in WebP or AVIF format, correctly sized, and off-screen ones are lazy-loaded.
• Width and height values are defined for images and embedded elements; there is no layout shift while the page loads.
• Unused CSS and JavaScript are cleaned up and non-critical scripts are deferred.
• Server response time is low; caching and compression (gzip or brotli) are enabled.
• Fonts are limited in number and loaded with the font-display setting.

07Mobile-Friendliness, HTTPS and Security

For sites where most visitors come from phones, mobile-responsive design is not only about user experience but directly about rankings.

• Because of mobile-first indexing, the mobile version contains the same content, headings and structured data as the desktop version.
• The viewport tag is defined; there is no horizontal scrolling, overflowing table or tiny tap target.
• All pages open over HTTPS, the SSL certificate is valid and there is no mixed content (http resource) warning.
• Full-screen pop-ups that block the content are not used on mobile.

08Structured Data and Crawl Budget

Structured data tells Google what a page is about in a machine-readable form. Schema types such as Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage can make rich result displays possible on the pages where they apply. Validate your schema with Google's official Rich Results Test.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Sample Company",
  "url": "https://www.ornek.com/",
  "logo": "https://www.ornek.com/logo.png"
}
</script>

Who Needs to Care About Crawl Budget?

Crawl budget is the amount of resources Google allocates to crawling your site in a given period. It is rarely a problem for sites with a few hundred pages, but it is decisive for e-commerce sites with tens of thousands of products and filter URLs.

To protect the budget, block endless filter combinations from crawling, shorten redirect chains, consolidate duplicate URLs with canonical tags and keep the sitemap up to date. For stores with large catalogs, setting up the filter and URL structure accordingly from the start is one of the things to ask about when choosing an e-commerce platform.

09How Often Should You Run the Check?

For most sites, checking Search Console alerts weekly and the whole of this list every three months is enough. After a site redesign, a URL structure change, a domain move or a large product upload, though, run the check right away.

The cheapest form of technical SEO happens when the site is built right from the start. If you are planning a new project, most of this list is completed before launch with SEO-friendly web design. We carry out the technical audit of your existing site as the first step of our SEO and analytics work.