The Technical SEO Checklist I Actually Run Before Launch

Most technical SEO checklists are padded to look thorough. This is the shorter list of things that have actually broken a launch for me.

Before you deploy

• Every page has a self-referential canonical — not a canonical pointing at staging
• robots.txt isn’t accidentally blocking the whole site (check this after every deploy pipeline change)
• sitemap.xml only lists pages that return 200 and aren’t noindex
• Open Graph image tags resolve to an absolute URL, not a relative path

Right after you deploy

• Submit the sitemap in Search Console and watch the coverage report for a week
• Run Lighthouse on mobile, not desktop — that’s the score that matters
• Check that the theme toggle (if you have one) doesn’t cause a flash of the wrong theme on load

The one people skip

Set dateModified and actually update it when you edit a post. Freshness signals are cheap to maintain and easy to forget.