Technical SEO checklist for new websites

The technical SEO essentials to get a brand-new site indexed and rank-ready from day one.

Published on

Launching a new website is the easy part — getting it found is the work. Over the years I’ve boiled the technical SEO essentials down to a checklist I run on every new site before it goes live.

It covers the things that quietly decide whether you get indexed and rank:

  • Crawlability — robots.txt, sitemaps, and clean, canonical URLs.
  • Metadata — titles, descriptions, and Open Graph that read well and don’t duplicate.
  • Structured data — schema.org markup that qualifies you for rich results.
  • Performance — Core Web Vitals, because speed is a ranking factor and a UX one.
  • Content hygiene — headings, internal links, and no orphan pages.

Most of it is baked into this starter already — structured data, OG images, and a clean 100 Lighthouse score out of the box. The full checklist walks through the rest, step by step.

Get the technical SEO checklist

Drop your email and I'll send you the full checklist for launching a new website.

You'll also join my occasional newsletter with new tools and ideas, you can unsubscribe at any time though.

This is a demo of the signup form — you can also read the checklist directly.