The technical SEO checklist we run before any site goes live
The launch-day checks that prevent the most common — and most expensive — search mistakes on a new build or replatform.
By AllFixAI search team
Indexation before everything else
Nothing else on this list matters if search engines cannot see the pages. Confirm that the production robots file allows crawling, that no staging hostname is accidentally blocking or allowing the wrong environment, and that every page you care about returns a 200 with a self-referencing canonical.
Then check for the quiet killers: duplicate canonical tags injected by two different plugins, pagination returning the same canonical as page one, and filtered views of a catalogue each generating their own indexable URL.
One URL, one purpose
Every commercial query should have exactly one page that answers it. When two pages compete, neither ranks as well as either could. Build a keyword-to-URL map and enforce it: one primary topic per page, one heading structure per page, and internal links that always point at the canonical version.
- Every indexable page has a unique title and description
- Exactly one h1 per page, matching the page's primary intent
- Canonical tags are absolute and self-referencing unless deliberately consolidated
- An XML sitemap is generated from the router, not maintained by hand
- Stale or duplicate pages are 301-redirected rather than left to soft-404
Rendering and speed
If meaningful content depends on client-side JavaScript, verify it appears in the rendered HTML. Server-rendering is usually the correct answer, and it also tends to improve every other metric on the page.
Check the render path: images sized and lazy-loaded below the fold, fonts preloaded with a stable fallback, third-party scripts deferred or removed, and a server response that stays fast under cache misses.
Structured data that reflects reality
Mark up what genuinely exists: Organization, Service, FAQ, Article, and Breadcrumb. Structured data is not a shortcut to rankings; it is a way to describe your business unambiguously. Do not mark up reviews you do not have or answers that are not on the page — that is how sites earn manual actions.
The migration runbook
If you are replacing an existing site, prepare a redirect map covering every URL with any inbound link or traffic, publish it before cutover, and monitor crawl stats and indexed counts daily for the first fortnight. Most catastrophic search losses are self-inflicted during a migration, and they are almost always reversible if caught in the first week.
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