Fix The Technical Problems Holding Back Your Website

Every technical review starts with the same list. Most sites have three or four real problems on it, not thirty — the job is finding which ones are costing you visibility.

The first question is always the same: is the page in the index? Search Console tells you directly. Common causes of a missing page are an accidental noindex tag, a robots.txt rule blocking a whole folder, a canonical pointing somewhere else, or a page so weakly linked internally that nothing ever crawls it.

The opposite problem is just as common. Tag archives, filtered URLs, staging copies and duplicate parameter versions get indexed and compete with the pages you actually care about. Sorting that out often lifts the pages you want without writing a word.

Most duplicate content problems are not plagiarism — they are the same page reachable at four addresses. http and https, www and non-www, with and without a trailing slash, and every version carrying a UTM tag from an old campaign.

The fix is boring and effective: pick one form, redirect the rest with permanent 301s, give every page a self-referencing canonical, and never build a redirect chain where one old URL hops through three others before it lands. If you are moving to a new site, read how we handle rebuilds without losing rankings.

Most small-business traffic is mobile, often on a poor signal. That is the condition your site should be judged in. We look at LCP (how fast the main content appears), INP (how quickly the page responds when someone taps) and CLS (whether the layout jumps around while it loads).

The usual culprits are enormous uncompressed hero images, three tracking scripts doing the job of one, fonts that block rendering, and heavy JavaScript for something a bit of HTML could do. Speed is a commercial issue: a slow page loses the call.

If your important content only appears after JavaScript runs, you are relying on crawlers to execute it correctly and on AI systems to bother at all. Many do not. The safe approach is to render the content that matters — headings, body copy, links, prices, contact details — in the HTML that comes back from the server.

Structured data follows the same rule. It should describe what is genuinely visible on the page, not invent reviews, ratings or offers that do not exist. That is a manual action waiting to happen.

A page nobody links to internally is a page you have half-published. Service pages should link to the relevant location and industry pages, blog articles should link into the services they discuss, and nothing important should be more than a couple of clicks from the homepage.

We also keep an eye on the reverse problem: hundreds of thin pages linking to each other in circles. Ten pages with a genuine reason to exist beat five hundred that do not — see how we handle local pages for what that looks like in practice.

HTTPS everywhere, no mixed-content warnings, a valid certificate and http redirecting to https once. Security headers where they make sense. Nothing exotic — just no obvious holes and no browser warnings scaring off customers.

Where the setup supports it, we submit new and genuinely updated URLs through IndexNow so Bing and Copilot pick up changes quickly. We do not resubmit unchanged pages — that is noise, and it helps nobody.