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Practical guide

# Technical SEO audit checklist for a new or redesigned website

Published 1 September 2026 · By the Bryzora team

A practical technical SEO checklist for launch day: crawlability, indexing, canonicals, metadata, links, structured data, and performance.

Technical Seo · Bryzora field notes

A redesign can look perfect in the browser and still create search problems. Old URLs may disappear, staging pages may remain indexable, or important pages may accidentally carry a noindex instruction.

Before launch, audit the pages search engines and customers actually need. Work from this checklist, then repeat the audit after the new site is live.

## 1. Confirm important pages can be reached

Create a list of the pages that should remain available: the homepage, main product or service pages, key articles, and any high-value landing pages. Visit them as a user would and check their HTTP responses. For changed URLs, map old addresses to the most relevant new pages with redirects.

Check internal links so navigation, footer links, and article links point to the live destination rather than the staging site or an old path.

## 2. Review crawl and index instructions

Inspect robots.txt, robots meta tags, and any HTTP X-Robots-Tag headers. Google explains that robots.txt controls crawling, while noindex is an indexing instruction. They are not interchangeable. Make sure launch-day rules do not block the pages you want found.

Build or update the XML sitemap with the preferred live URLs. Google notes that a sitemap is a discovery hint, not a guarantee that every listed page will be indexed.

## 3. Check the preferred version of each page

Inspect canonical tags, redirects, and internal links. They should agree on the URL you want treated as primary. Duplicate or near-duplicate pages are common, but conflicting signals make the site harder to understand. Google provides canonical guidance for these cases.

## 4. Inspect page-level content signals

Give important pages a distinct title and useful meta description. Check that headings describe the page clearly, images have appropriate alternative text, and structured data matches visible content. Audit several page templates, not only the homepage: product, article, category, and contact pages often fail in different ways.

## 5. Check performance and mobile usability

Review representative pages on mobile and desktop. Large images, layout shifts, and slow scripts can be introduced by a new theme or component library. Compare PageSpeed results before and after launch, then fix the issues that most affect the important journey.

## Make the audit repeatable

Save your launch baseline and assign owners to critical findings. Recheck after redirects, templates, and content updates have settled. A repeatable audit makes it easier to see which issues were fixed and which appeared later.

Bryzora’s SEO audit tool checks individual pages, groups of URLs, and sitemaps, and records findings over time. Start with your most important page templates before expanding to the full site.

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