June 2, 2026·Agape WorksSEO

A Technical SEO Checklist Before You Launch

Content strategy and backlinks get the attention, but most SEO problems we find during a launch review are more basic than that: search engines simply can't read the site correctly. No amount of great content fixes a crawl error.

Here's the checklist we run before anything ships.

Crawlability

robots.txt exists and isn't accidentally blocking everything. A Disallow: / left over from staging is the single most common launch-day mistake we see.
sitemap.xml is generated and submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Canonical tags are correct on every page — especially on sites with both www and non-www versions, or trailing-slash inconsistencies, which silently split ranking signal between duplicate URLs.

Structured data

JSON-LD for Organization on every page (name, logo, sameAs social links) — this is what populates knowledge panels and gives AI-driven search answers something concrete to cite.
Article schema on blog posts, Product schema on pricing/product pages if applicable.
Validate everything in Google's Rich Results Test before launch, not after.

Performance

Core Web Vitals pass on mobile, not just desktop — Google's index is mobile-first, and most real traffic is mobile too.
Images are served in modern formats (WebP/AVIF) and properly sized, not just scaled down with CSS.
Fonts don't block first paint — a slow web font is a common, invisible cause of a bad Largest Contentful Paint score.

Metadata

Every page has a unique title and description — templated boilerplate repeated across pages tells search engines the content is duplicate, even when it isn't.
Open Graph and Twitter Card tags are set, so shared links render properly instead of a blank card.
Heading structure is a real hierarchy (one h1, logically nested h2/h3) — not just whatever size text looked right in the design.

Why this list, not a content calendar

None of this is exciting. It's also the reason a technically clean site with modest content regularly outranks a content-rich site with a broken sitemap and duplicate titles. Content earns rankings over months; a crawl error can suppress them from day one.

We run this exact checklist on every site we ship. If you want a second pair of eyes on yours, get in touch.