Core Web Vitals and Site Speed Audit

Core Web Vitals are confirmed Google ranking factors. Every audit starts here because performance failures affect every page on your site simultaneously, and fixes at this level produce the widest impact. For detailed optimization strategies, see our Core Web Vitals optimization guide.

The three metrics that matter: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) must load under 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) must respond under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) must stay below 0.1. These thresholds come directly from Google’s page experience documentation, and field data from Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) is what Google actually uses for ranking, not lab scores.

Site Speed Audit Checklist

Test with Google PageSpeed Insights. Run both mobile and desktop tests on your homepage, top landing pages, and any page templates that serve more than 100 URLs. Record both field data (real users) and lab data (simulated). If field data shows failures but lab data passes, the problem is likely device-specific or network-dependent, and you need to test on slower hardware.

Check GTmetrix performance scores. GTmetrix provides waterfall charts that reveal exactly which resources block rendering. Look for render-blocking CSS, undeferred JavaScript, and third-party scripts that load before your main content. Each millisecond of render delay compounds across every page load.

Audit image optimization. Check for next-gen formats (WebP, AVIF), proper compression, lazy loading on below-fold images, and explicit width/height attributes to prevent layout shifts. Images are the most common LCP element, so this single checkpoint often accounts for the largest speed improvement.

Analyze JavaScript and CSS delivery. Identify render-blocking resources, unused code, and opportunities to defer or async non-critical scripts. Use Chrome DevTools Coverage tab to find dead code. On a typical site, 40-60% of loaded JavaScript is never executed on the initial page load.

Test server response times. Time to First Byte (TTFB) should be under 200ms. If it exceeds 600ms, investigate your hosting, CDN configuration, server-side rendering pipeline, or database query performance. No amount of frontend optimization fixes a slow origin server.

Mobile-First Indexing Audit

Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your pages for indexing and ranking. If your mobile experience is degraded relative to desktop, your search performance will suffer regardless of how well the desktop version performs.

Technical Requirements

Responsive design is the baseline expectation, not a differentiator. Verify that your viewport meta tag is configured correctly (<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">), that no horizontal scroll exists on any page, and that text is readable without zooming. Touch targets (buttons, links) need a minimum 48x48 pixel tap area with at least 8 pixels of spacing between adjacent targets.

Content Parity

Mobile and desktop must serve identical content, meta tags, and structured data. If you hide content on mobile behind accordions or tabs, Google may not weight it equally. The same internal and external links must be present. Forms and interactive elements must function on mobile. Use Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report to identify specific page-level failures, then cross-reference with Chrome DevTools device emulation to reproduce and fix each issue.

Mobile Audit Checklist

Test key pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and record any usability issues. Check the Mobile Usability report in Search Console for site-wide problems. Verify the viewport meta tag on every template. Test touch elements for proper sizing and spacing. Confirm that mobile page speed passes Core Web Vitals thresholds separately from desktop, since mobile scores are almost always worse.

Crawlability and Indexation Audit

If search engines cannot reach your pages, nothing else matters. Crawlability issues are silent killers: your content can be well-written, well-structured, and completely invisible because Googlebot never processes it.

Common Blocking Issues

Robots.txt misconfigurations that block important pages or resources. Noindex tags accidentally placed on valuable content. Password-protected staging environments leaking into production. JavaScript rendering failures where Googlebot sees a blank page. Each of these prevents crawling entirely, and you will not know about them unless you actively check.

Discovery Problems

Orphaned pages without any internal links pointing to them. Deep page hierarchy requiring five or more clicks from the homepage. Missing or incomplete XML sitemaps. Broken internal link chains where a redirect points to another redirect, which points to a 404. These do not block crawling outright, but they reduce crawl efficiency and signal to Google that these pages are low priority.

Crawlability Audit Steps

Analyze your robots.txt file. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check for accidental disallow rules on important directories. Use Search Console’s robots.txt tester to verify that Googlebot can access your key pages and resources (CSS, JS, images).

Review the Coverage report in Search Console. Sort by errors first, then warnings, then excluded. Pay attention to “Crawled, currently not indexed” pages. These are pages Google found, read, and decided not to include. That is a content quality signal, not a technical issue, and it requires a different fix. Our full SEO audit guide covers how to diagnose and address these quality-based exclusions.

Crawl your site with Screaming Frog. Set the crawler to respect robots.txt and run a full crawl. Export the results and look for broken links (4xx status codes), server errors (5xx), redirect chains (more than one hop), and pages with excessive crawl depth. Any page more than three clicks from the homepage should be restructured or linked more prominently.

Validate your XML sitemaps. Confirm your sitemap is submitted in Search Console, contains only 200-status URLs, excludes noindex pages, and updates automatically when you publish or remove content. A stale sitemap that lists 404 pages wastes crawl budget and sends negative quality signals.

URL Structure and Internal Linking Audit

Clean URL structure and deliberate internal linking help search engines understand your site hierarchy and distribute ranking authority to the pages that matter most.

URL Best Practices

URLs should be descriptive, include target keywords naturally, stay under 60 characters when possible, use hyphens as separators, and reflect your site’s logical hierarchy. Avoid dynamic parameters, session IDs, or unnecessary folder depth. Every URL should be lowercase, and trailing slashes should be consistent across the entire site (either always present or never present, enforced with redirects).

Internal Linking Strategy

Internal links serve two purposes: helping users navigate between related content and distributing page authority through your site. Anchor text should be descriptive and keyword-relevant, not “click here” or “read more.” Link from high-authority pages (homepage, top-ranking content) to the pages you want to rank. Every important page should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage.

URL and Internal Linking Audit Steps

Analyze URL structure consistency. Export all URLs from your crawl and check for inconsistent patterns (mixed trailing slashes, uppercase characters, parameter variations). Each inconsistency creates potential duplicate content or diluted authority.

Identify redirect chains. Any URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again wastes crawl budget and passes less authority with each hop. Flatten every chain to a single 301 redirect from the old URL to the final destination.

Map internal link distribution. Use Screaming Frog’s link analysis to identify pages with few or zero inbound internal links. These orphaned pages are effectively invisible to your link graph. Add contextual links from topically relevant content, and consider adding them to your content strategy plan for sustained internal linking improvements.

Check for orphaned pages. Any page that exists in your sitemap but has zero internal links pointing to it is an orphan. Either link to it from relevant content or, if it has no traffic or value, consider removing it.

Schema Markup and Structured Data Audit

Structured data helps search engines understand your content type, relationships, and key entities. Correct schema implementation leads to rich snippets (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, how-to steps) that increase click-through rates by 20-30% in many cases.

Priority Schema Types for 2026

Business schemas (Organization, LocalBusiness, WebSite) establish entity identity. Content schemas (Article, BlogPosting, HowTo, FAQPage) qualify pages for rich results. Product schemas (Product, Review, AggregateRating, Offer) drive ecommerce rich snippets. Breadcrumb schema improves how your URLs display in search results and is one of the easiest to implement with the highest visual impact. For a detailed walkthrough, see our schema markup guide.

Schema Audit Checklist

Test with Google’s Rich Results Test. Run every page template through the test and confirm that your structured data is valid, complete, and eligible for rich results. Fix any errors immediately, and treat warnings as high-priority improvements.

Audit schema implementation across page types. Check that every page has at minimum a BreadcrumbList schema. Blog posts should have Article or BlogPosting schema. Service pages should have Service or WebApplication schema. FAQ pages should have FAQPage schema. Missing schema on a page type means leaving rich result real estate to your competitors.

Monitor Search Console Enhancements reports. These reports surface structured data errors, warnings, and valid items across your entire site. Review them monthly and fix new errors within a week. A single schema error on a template that serves 500 pages means 500 pages losing rich result eligibility.

HTTPS and Security Audit

HTTPS is a confirmed ranking factor, and security failures erode both rankings and user trust. A browser warning on your site will tank conversion rates faster than any algorithm change.

Security Audit Points

Verify SSL certificate installation. Check that your certificate is valid, not expired, covers all subdomains you use (including www), and the full certificate chain resolves without errors. Use SSL Labs (ssllabs.com/ssltest) for a detailed report.

Test HTTPS redirects. Every HTTP URL must 301 redirect to its HTTPS equivalent. Test your homepage, key landing pages, and at least one URL from each subdirectory. A single non-redirecting HTTP page creates a duplicate content issue and a security gap.

Check for mixed content. Mixed content occurs when an HTTPS page loads images, scripts, or stylesheets over HTTP. Modern browsers block some mixed content outright and warn on the rest. Use Chrome DevTools Console to identify mixed content warnings, then update the resource URLs to HTTPS.

Review security headers. Implement HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) to force browsers to use HTTPS. Add Content Security Policy (CSP), X-Content-Type-Options, and X-Frame-Options headers. These do not directly affect SEO rankings, but they prevent your site from being exploited in ways that would.

Technical SEO Action Plan

Not every issue carries equal weight. Use this prioritization framework to decide what to fix and in what order. Fixing a critical issue on 500 pages beats perfecting one low-priority item.

Critical issues to fix immediately: Core Web Vitals failures across template-level pages, mobile usability errors flagged in Search Console, crawl errors blocking important pages from indexation, HTTPS and security certificate failures, broken internal links on high-traffic pages. These directly suppress rankings and should be resolved within days, not weeks.

Important issues to fix this month: URL structure inconsistencies, schema markup gaps on major page templates, internal linking improvements for orphaned or under-linked content, image optimization (format conversion, compression, lazy loading), and page speed improvements that move you from “needs improvement” to “good” on Core Web Vitals.

Optimizations for next quarter: Advanced schema types (Product, HowTo, Video), performance fine-tuning for marginal gains, content quality improvements on pages flagged as “crawled but not indexed,” user experience refinements informed by Microsoft Clarity session recordings, and setting up automated monitoring with Google Search Console alerts and Screaming Frog scheduled crawls.

If you want this audit done for you, our technical SEO team runs the full 50+ checkpoint sequence, prioritizes the fix list by estimated traffic impact, and implements the changes. Or if you prefer to start with data, request a free technical audit and we will send back a prioritized report within 48 hours.

Frequently Asked Questions