Technical SEO checklist before you launch a new site

Launch day excitement fades fast if organic traffic drops because redirects were wrong, canonicals conflicted, or staging leaked into the index. Technical SEO is the plumbing: invisible when correct, expensive when broken. Use this checklist as a conversation starter with your developers and SEO owner—not as a substitute for testing in a staging environment.

Crawling and indexing

• Robots.txt allows production crawlers and blocks genuine junk paths only.
• No accidental noindex on live templates; staging remains disallowed or passworded.
• XML sitemaps list canonical URLs and are referenced in Search Console.

URL architecture and redirects

For migrations, map every old URL to a destination: 301 to the closest relevant page, or 410 when content is truly gone. Avoid chains of multiple hops and clean up temporary 302s used during development. Preserve query parameters only when they carry real content—not session IDs.

Canonicals and duplicates

Decide the canonical host (www vs non-www, HTTPS only) and enforce it at the edge. Parameterized faceted navigation, print views, and tag pages often duplicate content; use canonical tags or consolidation rules deliberately rather than letting search engines guess.

Structured data and metadata

Implement Organization, WebSite, and relevant types (Article, Product, LocalBusiness) where truthful. Validate with Rich Results Test. Titles and meta descriptions should be unique per important URL and reflect the primary intent of the page—not keyword stuffing.

After launch

• Monitor coverage and crawl errors weekly for the first month.
• Compare landing-page performance year-over-year where seasonality allows.
• Keep a changelog of template changes that affect headings or internal links.