Technical site audit: what to check first

Why it comes before everything else

Working on text and links on a technically broken site is like renovating a flat in a building with a ruined foundation. Formally something is happening, but the result does not hold.

A typical example: the site opens at two addresses, with and without www. To a person that is one site; to a search engine it is two different sites with identical content. Every page competes with itself and the authority is split in half. Until that is fixed, any investment in content works at half strength.

Group one: indexing

The most important. If a page is not in the search engine's database, it does not exist, however good it is.

• How many pages are in the index and whether that matches reality. A sharp discrepancy in either direction is worth investigating.
• The robots.txt file — whether something that should be open has been closed by accident. The classic disaster: the site launched but the indexing ban from the test server was never removed.
• The sitemap — it exists, it is current, and it contains only working addresses.
• The noindex tag — whether it sits where it should not.
• Response codes — working pages return 200, deleted ones 404, moved ones 301.

Group two: duplicates

Duplicates are the most common and most underrated problem. The search engine sees several addresses with identical content and cannot tell which one is the original.

Group three: speed

Speed matters twice: directly as a ranking factor and indirectly through the people who do not wait for the page to load. The second usually hits harder.

• Heavy images with no compression and no modern format — cause number one.
• Scripts that block the page from rendering.
• No caching: every visit downloads everything again.
• Slow hosting: the server thinks for a second before it starts sending the page.
• Unnecessary third-party connections: widgets, counters and chats nobody uses.

A sensible target for mobile: the first screen visible in 1.5–2 seconds. Anything beyond three seconds loses a noticeable share of people.

Group four: the mobile version

Search engines judge a site by its mobile version, not the desktop one. If something is broken on a phone, it affects rankings everywhere, including on desktop.

• Text is readable without zooming.
• Nothing runs off the screen and there is no horizontal scrolling.
• Buttons and links can be hit with a finger: at least 24 pixels, with gaps between them.
• Pop-ups do not cover the whole screen straight after entry.
• Forms can be filled in from a phone without pain: correct field types, large controls.

Group five: structure and markup

• Headings — one h1 per page, then h2 and h3 in order, without skipping levels.
• Title and description — unique per page, not templated and not empty.
• Page addresses — readable and meaningful, not a string of digits.
• Internal links — important pages reachable in 2–3 clicks from the home page.
• Structured data — markup for the organisation, services, reviews and breadcrumbs.
• Broken links — there should be none, inside the site or in the menu.

What order to fix things in

The list of errors from an audit is usually long, and trying to fix everything at once ends with nothing fixed. In order of impact:

1. Anything blocking indexingClosed pages, server errors, a missing sitemap. Without this the rest is pointless.
2. Duplicates and redirectsOne site should be one site. This is fixed once and lasts.
3. The mobile versionEverything else is judged by it.
4. SpeedStart with images — usually half the problem and the cheapest half.
5. Markup and structureHeadings, meta tags, structured data.
6. CosmeticsMinor warnings that affect nothing but look good in a report as «fixed».