Crawling and indexing
- robots.txt exists and does not block important sections.
- XML sitemap exists, is listed in robots.txt and submitted to Google and Bing.
- Important pages return 200 and are not set to noindex.
- Missing pages return a real 404, not a 200 “soft 404”.
- Each page has a self-referencing canonical.
- Main content is present in the HTML, not only rendered by JavaScript.
Site structure
- Clean, lowercase, hyphenated URLs.
- Every important page is within three clicks of the home page.
- Breadcrumbs on deeper pages.
- Internal links with descriptive anchor text.
- No redirect chains; links point at final URLs.
Check your own site
Run free auditSee how your site scores on this in about two minutes.
Security and protocol
- HTTPS everywhere with a valid certificate.
- HTTP and www variants 301-redirect to one version.
- HSTS and basic security headers.
- No mixed content.
- HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 enabled.
Speed and mobile
- Viewport meta tag and responsive layout.
- LCP under 2.5s, CLS under 0.1.
- Compression (Gzip or Brotli) and browser caching.
- Images compressed, sized and lazy-loaded below the fold.
- Minimal render-blocking scripts.
Markup and AI readiness
- Valid structured data for your organisation and content types.
- Language and charset declared.
- AI search crawlers allowed in robots.txt.
- llms.txt published.
A EmojiCry audit runs most of these checks automatically and tells you which to fix first.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run a technical audit?
Monthly for active sites, and after every redesign, migration or major plugin change.
What is the most common technical problem?
Pages accidentally blocked or set to noindex, and slow mobile load times.