Core Web Vitals & SEO: A Technical Web Development Checklist
A technical SEO and Core Web Vitals checklist for business websites — LCP, INP, CLS, crawlability, and what developers must fix.
Ranking for competitive terms — like finding the best web development company — requires more than blog posts. Google weighs experience signals: Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, and clean technical SEO. Developers own most of this list.
Core Web Vitals targets
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — optimise hero images, server response, critical CSS
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — reduce long JavaScript tasks on main thread
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — reserve space for images, ads, and web fonts
Run Lighthouse and PageSpeed on real mobile hardware, not only desktop emulators.
Crawlability essentials
Canonical URLs, XML sitemap, robots.txt that does not block CSS/JS, meaningful title and meta description per page, structured data for organization and articles on blogs. Avoid duplicate homepages on www/non-www — pick one host and 301 the rest.
Content structure
One H1 per page, logical heading order, internal links to service pages, descriptive alt text on images. Blog content should answer intent — not keyword stuffing — with clear author and publish dates.
Performance hygiene
Compress WebP/AVIF images, lazy-load below-fold media, HTTP/2 or HTTP/3, cache headers for static assets, minimal third-party scripts (chat widgets kill INP).
Ship with SEO built in
Sync2Web bakes technical SEO into web development engagements — not as an afterthought invoice. Audit your site or request a review when replatforming.