The Ultimate Technical SEO Checklist for Developers

Technical SEO forms the foundation of your entire search strategy. Without a solid technical base, even the best content won't reach its ranking potential. This comprehensive checklist covers everything developers need to know.

Core Web Vitals

Google's page experience signals have made site performance a ranking factor. Here's what you need to optimize:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Target: Under 2.5 seconds. Optimize by:

• Implementing lazy loading for below-fold images
• Using modern image formats (WebP, AVIF)
• Preloading critical resources
• Using a CDN for static assets

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Target: Under 200 milliseconds. Optimize by:

• Breaking up long JavaScript tasks
• Using web workers for heavy computations
• Optimizing event handlers

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Target: Under 0.1. Optimize by:

• Setting explicit dimensions on images and embeds
• Reserving space for dynamic content
• Avoiding inserting content above existing content

JavaScript SEO

With the rise of JavaScript frameworks, ensuring crawlability is crucial:

• Use server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG) — tools like Screaming Frog can help audit JavaScript rendering issues
• Implement dynamic rendering for Googlebot if needed
• Ensure critical content is in the initial HTML
• Test rendering with Google's URL Inspection tool

Indexation Control

• Maintain an up-to-date XML sitemap
• Use robots.txt to control crawl budget
• Implement proper canonical tags
• Use noindex for thin or duplicate content