TECHNICAL SEO

Crawl, render and speed issues, fixed.

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on. If search engines cannot crawl, render and index your pages, no content or links will make up for it. We do not sell it as a service. This page is the checklist we run on every site we own.

Core Web VitalsCrawl & indexMigrations
SEO Butler penguin holding a glowing speed gauge and a site structure diagram
01 — Why it matters

Why technical problems cap everything else.

A page that is not indexed cannot rank. A page that takes six seconds loses the visitor. A site that wastes crawl budget on filter URLs leaves its real pages unseen.

None of it is glamorous. It is usually why a site that does everything else right still does not move. We will not buy a link for our own sites until this list is clean.

01

Indexing first

What is in the index versus what should be. Fix the gap first, and keep one canonical answer per topic.

02

Core Web Vitals and rendering

LCP, INP and CLS on real pages, with the specific fix for each. What the crawler sees on a JavaScript-heavy page is often not what you see.

03

Crawl efficiency

Parameters, facets and pagination tidied so budget goes to the pages that matter.

Free calculator

Crawl budget calculator: how long until Google sees your whole site?

On a large site, the gap between publishing and ranking is often just crawl time. Enter your page count and the crawl rate from your Search Console crawl stats to see how long a full pass takes, and how much of that budget you are wasting.

Indexable pages12,000
Average crawl requests per day1,800

Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats → average per day.

Share of crawls hitting junk URLs35

Faceted filters, session parameters, redirect chains, paginated dead ends.

10Days per full pass
4Days you would save
Crawl efficiency65%

A full pass at this rate is comfortable.

Where the wasted budget usually goes

  • 1Parameter and faceted URLsEvery filter combination is a new URL unless you stop it being one.
  • 2Redirect chainsEach hop is a separate request spent to reach one page.
  • 3Soft 404s and thin archivesTag and date archives that exist only because the theme made them.

Crawl budget only becomes the bottleneck at scale — under a few thousand pages, indexation problems are almost always about quality or internal linking instead. If pages are being crawled but not indexed, start with the indexing troubleshooter.

Crawl rate is set by Google based on your server's response, not by you. Making the site faster is the one lever that reliably raises it.

Book a technical audit
02 — How it works

How a technical pass runs on one of our sites.

Crawl, prioritise, fix, verify. The list is ordered by impact, not by severity colour.

01

Full crawl and triage

Every URL crawled and rendered, checked against Search Console and log files. Then: what changes rankings, what is housekeeping, what is noise.

02

Fix plan and implementation

Cause, fix and owner for each issue. Template-level wherever possible, so one change covers every page of that type.

03

Verification

Re-crawl after the fixes, plus monitoring for regressions.

STEP 01Site crawled
STEP 02Issues triaged
STEP 03Fixes shipped
STEP 04Re-crawled and verified
03 — Markets & audiences

What the checklist covers.

The full list is long. These produce most of the wins.

01

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Render-blocking resources, images, caching, fonts, third-party scripts.

02

Indexing and crawlability

Robots, sitemaps, canonicals, noindex, redirect chains, orphan pages.

03

Mobile, structure and security

Mobile-first rendering, layout shifts, JavaScript off. Architecture, link depth, HTTPS, mixed content, hreflang.

Migrations

The riskiest day in SEO

Map the redirects, test in staging, watch hour by hour. We have moved enough of our own sites to know what breaks.

International

hreflang without the headaches

Most of our sites are multi-market. This one gets practice.

Monitoring

Catch it before rankings do

Scheduled crawls and alerts, so a bad deploy is caught in days.

Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about technical SEO audits and fixes.

What does a technical SEO audit include?

A full crawl and render, checked against Search Console and logs: indexing, crawlability, speed, mobile, redirects, canonicals, duplication, structured data, sitemaps, robots, HTTPS, link depth.

How long does an audit take?

One to two weeks for most sites, plus implementation. Very large sites take longer.

Do you audit or fix client sites?

No. We only do technical work on our own sites. The calculator above is free, and the how-to guides on our blog cover the common fixes.

Will technical SEO make my site faster?

Usually, yes. But chase the fixes that affect rankings and users, not a lab score.

What about site migrations?

Map the redirects, test in staging, monitor closely after launch. Do not buy links mid-migration.

What about JavaScript-heavy sites?

Render the page the way a crawler does and compare it with the browser. Content that only appears after interaction needs to be served differently.

How important is hreflang for multiple countries?

Very. It is the first thing we check on any multi-market site, including our own.

How often should a site be audited?

A full pass once a year, lighter monitoring in between. Frequent deploys deserve scheduled crawls.