Technical SEO: the checklist to run before every launch

A well-run redesign can lose half its traffic in a week. Not because of the design or the content, but because of a forgotten technical detail: a tag inherited from the staging environment, a missing redirect, a misconfigured file.

Here's the list we go through before every launch. It takes about thirty minutes and prevents most bad surprises.

Indexing: let Google in#

This is the point that does the most damage, because it's invisible to visitors.

• The noindex tag: staging sites are often protected by a <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. Check that it hasn't followed the site into production.
• The robots.txt file: a Disallow: / left by mistake forbids crawling of the entire site. Open your-site.com/robots.txt and read it.
• The sitemap: it must exist, list only accessible pages (no redirects, no 404 errors) and be declared in robots.txt.

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://www.your-site.com/sitemap.xml

Redirects: lose nothing along the way#

If URLs change, every old URL must redirect to the new one with a 301 (permanent redirect). A 302 signals a temporary change, and search engines may keep indexing the old address.

Two common traps:

• redirect chains (A to B, then B to C): each step slows loading and dilutes the signal;
• loops (A to B, then B to A): the page simply becomes unreachable.

One version of each page#

For a search engine, http://, https://, with or without www, with or without a trailing slash: these are all different addresses. Pick one version, redirect all the others to it, and declare it on every page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.your-site.com/pricing/">

The canonical tag must point to a page that returns a 200, is indexable, and isn't itself canonicalized elsewhere.

The tags on each page#

• Title: unique for each page, with the main topic first. Beyond around sixty characters, Google tends to truncate it in its results.
• Meta description: it doesn't directly affect rankings, but it makes people click. Aim for about 150 characters, written like a hook.
• H1 heading: only one per page, clearly stating what it's about.

Performance and mobile#

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Test your main pages on a real phone, not just by shrinking your browser window. Also check the Core Web Vitals of your most visited page templates: home page, product page, article.

After launch#

The work doesn't stop on launch day. For the first few weeks, watch the number of indexed pages, crawl errors and queries that lose positions in Search Console. A sudden drop almost always signals a technical problem, rarely a content problem.

Codanalyst reviews most of these points automatically, and can rerun the audit after every deployment. Try it on your site before your next launch.