Technical SEO checklist before launching a website
Many SEO problems start on launch day and are only discovered months later. This is the checklist we run through before switching on any site.
Basics
- HTTPS is on, and the http and www versions redirect to one main address.
- Every page has exactly one address: versions with and without a trailing slash redirect to each other, and canonical tags are set correctly.
- robots.txt doesn't block important pages (a common leftover from the staging site).
Content and structure
- Unique title and meta description for every page: about 60 characters for the title, 160 for the description.
- One H1 per page that states clearly what the page is about.
- Alt text on images.
- Internal links between service, portfolio and article pages.
Multilingual sites
- A separate URL per language (for example /ar/ and /en/).
- hreflang tags linking all versions to each other.
- Content written for each language's audience, not machine-translated.
Technical
- An XML sitemap covering every language.
- Structured data (business, services, articles, FAQs) without errors; check it with Google's Rich Results Test.
- Speed on mobile: compressed images, self-hosted fonts and no unnecessary code.
After launch
Register the site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, and watch indexing reports for the first few weeks. If you have a local business, set up a Google Business Profile too.
We apply every item on this list to the sites we build from day one, including this one.