Technical SEO
Technical SEO checklist: what to fix first on a small website
You don’t need a perfect score to rank. This checklist covers the technical issues that really hold small websites back, in the order worth fixing them.
Technical SEO can feel endless, but a small website only needs a short list done well.
1. Can Google reach your pages?
Check Google Search Console’s page indexing report. Look for important pages marked as excluded, and make sure nothing is blocked by accident in robots.txt or by a noindex tag.
2. Are there broken pages?
Links that lead to errors waste visitors’ time and your site’s authority. Fix them, or redirect old addresses to the closest matching page.
3. Does each page have one clear address?
Versions with and without www, or with and without a trailing slash, should all lead to one address. Redirect the others to it.
4. Does it work well on a phone?
Most searches happen on phones. Open your site on a real one and try the main tasks: reading a page, tapping a button and filling in a form.
5. Is it reasonably fast?
Compress large images first, as they are the most common cause of slow pages. Then look at anything else your speed report flags.
Once these are in order, your time is usually better spent on content and links than on small technical gains.
