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The Website Health Checklist

The 85 checks every website should pass before launch

A printable checklist covering all six audit pillars: accessibility, SEO, security, performance, content quality, and AI readiness.

For: Agency owners, in-house developers, marketing leads

A preview of what is inside

Every check is either a binary pass/fail or a "review this and decide" prompt. Items marked [critical] mean the site should not ship without them. Here are a few examples from each pillar.

SEO

  • Confirm robots.txt does not block production routes that should be indexed.
  • Every page has a unique meta description between 120 and 160 characters.
  • Homepage carries Organization JSON-LD with name, url, and logo.

Accessibility

  • Every interactive element is reachable and operable by keyboard alone.
  • Text contrast meets 4.5:1 for body, 3:1 for large text.
  • Skip-to-content link is the first focusable element on every page.

Security

  • HSTS header is set with a year-long max-age and the preload flag.
  • Session cookies have Secure, HttpOnly, and SameSite=Lax or stricter.
  • Admin paths return 404 or 403 from the public site.

Performance

  • Largest Contentful Paint is under 2.5s on mobile.
  • Images are served in WebP or AVIF with explicit width and height.
  • Static assets have a 1-year Cache-Control with hashed filenames.

Content quality

  • Articles show datePublished and dateModified prominently.
  • No broken internal links anywhere on the site.
  • Author pages exist for every named byline, with verified profile links.

AI readiness (AEO)

  • Key facts appear in the first 100 words of any page that should be cited.
  • Person and Organization schema link out via sameAs to verified profiles.
  • The site is reachable by GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends.

Get the full 85-check version, including 16 critical items and a post-launch quarterly review, below.

A practical, reusable checklist agencies print and run with clients. Developers run it pre-launch. Marketers use it as a brief for their dev team. Covers the same six pillars Kritano audits automatically, so the manual version doubles as a tour of what the platform does for you.