The technical checklist, in the order things break

Ordered by what it costs you when it is wrong, which is not the same as ordered by how hard it is to fix. Several of the worst are ten minute jobs.

Catastrophic when wrong

• robots.txt is not blocking your own site. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / then you are asking every search engine to ignore everything. It happens after redesigns when a staging file gets copied to production. Syntax is documented by Google.
• No stray noindex tags. Same failure mode, page level. View source and search for noindex. Correct on a thank you page, catastrophic on a product page.
• The enquiry form actually delivers. Submit it yourself, from a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Then check the spam folder. Detail in how to find out whether your enquiry form still works.
• The site loads at all on a phone. Not a simulator. An actual mid range phone on mobile data.
• HTTPS works on every page. Browsers mark sites without it as Not secure. Certificates are free through Let’s Encrypt and should renew automatically.

Expensive and usually invisible

• The phone number is text, not an image. Tap it on a phone. If nothing happens, every mobile visitor has to type it manually and most will not.
• Indexed page count roughly matches reality. Search Console tells you how many pages Google has stored. Two hundred products and six indexed pages is the whole problem in one number.
• A sitemap exists and is submitted. Built to Google’s spec, containing only pages you actually want indexed.
• Canonical tags are present and self referencing. Otherwise credit for one page splits across several addresses. See Google on duplicate URLs.
• Every old URL redirects after a rebuild. A 301, permanent, to the closest new equivalent.
• Titles and descriptions are written. Home and Welcome to our website loses to a competitor who said what they sell. Google explains how snippets are chosen.

Speed, measured properly

• Run PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab. Desktop score is close to irrelevant since Google uses mobile first indexing.
• Total page weight under 900 KB above the fold. That is our build target, and you can read it off the network panel.
• LCP under 2.5 seconds. How long until the biggest element appears.
• CLS near zero. Caused almost entirely by images with no declared width and height.
• INP under 200 milliseconds. Usually a script problem, often from widgets nobody uses any more.
• Images served as WebP. Typically twenty five to thirty five percent smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
• Nothing loads from four different third party domains. Each one is a separate connection before anything appears.

Structure and content

• One page per product or service. The single highest return structural change for a manufacturer.
• Specifications exist as text. Not as a picture of a table. This is what decides whether search engines and assistants can read your range at all.
• One H1 per page, describing that page.
• Alt text on meaningful images. Needed by screen readers and it is the only way a search engine knows what a picture shows. Part of WCAG.
• Cities served appear as text. Indian B2B search is geographic and a map embed does not count.
• Internal links between related pages. A page nothing links to is a page search engines reach last and value least.
• Breadcrumbs, visible and marked up. Helps people and produces a better looking search result.

Machine readability

• Structured data present and valid. Test with the Rich Results Test. Start with Organization and Product.
• FAQ markup only where real questions exist. FAQPage is powerful and misusing it falls under spam policies.
• An llms.txt file. Optional, cheap, described at llmstxt.org.
• Language and region declared. If you run more than one language, hreflang tells Google which version suits whom. Whether you should is covered in the regional language piece.

Ownership and safety

• The domain is registered to your company. Check at ICANN Lookup. For .in domains the registry is NIXI. A third of the companies we audit do not control their own.
• Backups exist and have been restored once. An untested backup is a hope with a filename.
• Everything is patched. If you run WordPress this is the whole ballgame, and the update process is documented. More in website security for a business without an IT department.

What to do with the results

Anything failing in the first two sections gets fixed this month, whatever else is planned. Those are cheap and they are costing you enquiries now.

Everything else feeds a decision about repair against rebuild, which is worth taking seriously in both directions. Fixing the three worst findings often takes a week and recovers most of the loss, and we set out when starting again is the wrong call in when not to rebuild.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.