A technical SEO checklist for new sites

New sites lose most of their early SEO to a handful of avoidable mistakes, usually something left over from the staging site. This checklist covers what to check before launch, on launch day and in the first weeks.

Before launch

Decide what should be indexed. List the page types that should appear in search (home, categories, products, articles) and the ones that should not (internal search results, filters, account pages, thank-you pages).

Check the templates, not just pages. Each template should have a unique, descriptive title and meta description pattern, one H1, and a self-referencing canonical where appropriate.

Plan the URLs. Short, readable, lowercase, with hyphens. Decide once whether URLs end with a slash and stick to it.

If you are replacing an old site, map the redirects. Every old URL with traffic or links needs a single 301 to its closest new equivalent. See our note on migrations in A first-week technical SEO audit.

Launch day

1. Remove staging blocks. Check robots.txt for Disallow: /, and the page source for noindex. It is a classic launch mistake, and an expensive one.
2. HTTPS everywhere. HTTP and the non-preferred hostname (with or without www) should redirect, in one step, to the preferred version.
3. XML sitemap. Generate it, make sure it lists only indexable pages that return 200, and reference it in robots.txt.
4. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Verify the site and submit the sitemap in both.
5. Analytics. Confirm it is recording on every template.
6. A real 404 page. Missing pages should return a 404 status, not a 200 with an error message.

First week

• Crawl the live site and fix broken internal links, redirect chains and missing titles.
• Inspect key URLs in Search Console to see how Google renders them.
• Check mobile on a real phone: menus, buttons, pop-ups and text size.
• Check speed on your main templates with PageSpeed Insights.
• Add structured data where it genuinely describes the page (organisation, products, articles, breadcrumbs) and validate it.

First month

• Review the Pages report in Search Console for pages that are excluded and should not be, or included and should not be.
• Watch for soft 404s and duplicates, often from filters and parameters.
• Build internal links to the pages that matter most: they should be reachable in a few clicks from the home page.
• Keep a change log of deployments, so you can match any traffic change to a release.

The short version

Many launch problems come down to three things: search engines told not to index the site, broken or missing redirects, and pages that render differently to search engines than to people. Check those three before anything else.

What is on your launch checklist that is not here? Share it in the Technical SEO community.