21 August 2026 / 7 min read

A technical SEO checklist for a new website

The technical work that genuinely affects rankings on a new site, in the order it is worth doing.

seo
websites
search

Technical SEO is not a dark art. It is a short list of things that must be true, and a much longer list of things people sell you that barely move.

The short answer

Be crawlable, be fast on a phone, give every page one clear subject with a unique title and description, describe yourself in structured data, and link your own pages together sensibly. That covers most of what technical SEO can do for a new site.

Do these first

Let crawlers in. No stray sitewide blocking rule. Check it before launch and after.
One canonical URL per page, pointing at itself. Not the homepage.
Unique title and description per page. Under about 60 and 160 characters, each describing that page alone.
One H1 per page, matching the subject.
A sitemap that lists every public page, generated rather than hand-maintained, and referenced from your crawler rules.
HTTPS everywhere, with one hostname. Pick www or bare and redirect the other.
Sensible URLs that read like a path, and never change without a redirect.

Then performance

Real images, sized and served in a modern format. This is the single biggest win on most sites.
Fonts self-hosted and preloaded, not fetched from a third party.
Nothing animating over the main headline before it paints.
Measure on a mid-range phone, not your laptop.

Then structure

Structured data describing the organisation, and the right type per page — article, product, service, breadcrumbs on deep pages.
Internal links from your strongest pages to the ones you want found.
No orphan pages: everything reachable in two or three clicks.
Descriptive alt text on images that carry meaning.

What barely matters

Keyword density. Meta keywords. Dozens of thin location pages. Buying links. Chasing a score in a plugin dashboard rather than a real page speed measurement.

Then the bit nobody automates

Content that answers the question better than the pages currently ranking. Technical work removes obstacles; it does not create a reason to rank.

Verify it

Connect Search Console, submit the sitemap and read the coverage report. Then wait — indexing a new site is weeks, not days.