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Technical SEO Checklist for South African Websites

By Shane Snyman, JWD Website Design 17 June 2026

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on. You can write brilliant content and earn great backlinks, but if Google cannot crawl your site properly, or if your pages load slowly, or if your site is not secure, your rankings will be limited regardless of how good the rest of your work is.

This checklist covers the technical SEO essentials for South African websites. It is written for business owners, not developers - you do not need to understand every technical detail, but you do need to know what to check and what to ask your web developer about.

Is Your Website Using HTTPS?

Technical SEO covers the foundational requirements that allow Google to crawl, index, and rank your website. For South African sites, the most important items are: HTTPS (an SSL certificate is now a baseline requirement and a ranking signal), mobile-friendliness (Google indexes the mobile version of your site first), page speed (test with PageSpeed Insights and aim above 70 on mobile), Core Web Vitals compliance, a valid XML sitemap, clean URL structure, and correct robots.txt configuration. Most of these issues can be identified for free using Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.

Look at your browser’s address bar right now. Does your site URL start with https:// or http://? If it is still http://, your site is not secure and Google will penalise it.

HTTPS encrypts the connection between a visitor’s browser and your website, protecting any data they submit (contact forms, purchases, login details). Google has used HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014, and modern browsers actively warn visitors when they land on non-secure sites with messages like “Your connection is not private.”

Getting HTTPS requires an SSL certificate installed on your hosting server. Most reputable South African hosting providers either include free SSL certificates (via Let’s Encrypt) or offer them as an add-on. If your site still runs on HTTP, contact your host today - this is an urgent fix.

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means Google primarily looks at the mobile version of your website when determining your rankings - even for searches made on desktop computers. If your mobile experience is poor, your rankings suffer for everyone.

Test your site using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test at search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. It will tell you whether Google considers your site mobile-friendly and flag any specific issues.

Common mobile problems to look for:

Text that is too small to read without zooming
Buttons or links that are too close together to tap accurately
Content that extends beyond the screen width and requires horizontal scrolling
Pop-ups that cover the main content on mobile (Google specifically penalises intrusive mobile interstitials)
Images that are not optimised for smaller screens

Most modern WordPress themes are mobile-responsive by default, but that does not mean there are no mobile issues. Custom designs and page builders can introduce mobile problems that need testing.

How Fast Does Your Website Load?

Site speed is a direct Google ranking factor, and it is one that South African businesses particularly need to pay attention to. South African internet infrastructure, while improving, can be slower than European or American connections, and a significant portion of your visitors may be on mobile data rather than fibre.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) to test your site speed. It gives you a score from 0 to 100 for both mobile and desktop, and it lists specific issues to fix. Aim for a score above 70 on mobile and above 85 on desktop.

The most common speed problems on South African WordPress sites:

Images that are too large: A photo from your phone camera can be 4MB or more. On a web page it should be under 200KB for most uses. Compress and resize images before uploading them, or use a plugin that does this automatically.
No caching: Caching stores a copy of your pages so they do not have to be rebuilt from scratch every time someone visits. Good caching plugins for WordPress include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and LiteSpeed Cache.
Too many plugins: Every plugin you add to WordPress adds code that needs to load. Audit your plugins regularly and deactivate any you do not actually use.
Shared hosting that cannot handle traffic: Budget shared hosting is fine for small sites with low traffic, but if you are getting decent visitor numbers, the server itself may be the bottleneck.

Our WordPress Technical SEO guide goes into significantly more depth on speed optimisation for WordPress specifically.

What Are Core Web Vitals and Why Do They Matter?

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are a set of specific page experience metrics that Google uses as ranking signals. They measure real-world performance from the perspective of visitors - not just how fast a page loads in a test, but how it actually feels to use.

The three Core Web Vitals are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - How long does it take for the largest visible element on the page (usually a hero image or a large block of text) to load? Google’s threshold is under 2.5 seconds. Above 4 seconds is considered poor.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - Does the page content jump around while it is loading? You know this experience: you go to tap a button, and just as you do, an image loads above it and the button moves down, so you end up tapping something else. CLS measures how much the layout shifts. Google wants it below 0.1.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) - How quickly does the page respond when you click or tap something? This replaced First Input Delay in 2024. Google’s threshold is under 200 milliseconds.

You can check your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console (searchconsole.google.com) under the “Core Web Vitals” report. This shows real-world data from actual visitors to your site, not just lab test results.

Does Your Website Have an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website and provides metadata about each one (when it was last updated, how important it is relative to other pages). It gives Google a map to follow when crawling your site.

To check if you have one, try visiting yourwebsite.co.za/sitemap.xml or yourwebsite.co.za/sitemap_index.xml. If you see a list of URLs, you have a sitemap. If you see a 404 error, you do not.

For WordPress sites, plugins like Rank Math or Yoast SEO generate sitemaps automatically. Once you have a sitemap, submit it to Google Search Console so Google knows where to find it.

Keep your sitemap clean. It should only include pages you want Google to index - your main pages, service pages, blog posts, product pages. It should not include tag pages, author archive pages, login pages, or other technical URLs that add no value to visitors.

Is Your robots.txt File Set Up Correctly?

Your robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they are allowed to visit and which they should ignore. It is a plain text file accessible at yourwebsite.co.za/robots.txt.

Most WordPress sites have a robots.txt that works fine by default. The main things to check:

Make sure the file does not accidentally block Google from crawling your entire site. A misconfigured robots.txt that says Disallow: / for all crawlers is a common and catastrophic mistake that makes you completely invisible to Google.
Your sitemap URL should be referenced in your robots.txt file.
Sections of your site that do not need to be indexed (like admin areas, login pages, or staging sites) should be blocked.

If your site went through a migration or redesign recently, check the robots.txt file. Development sites are sometimes configured to block crawlers, and that setting occasionally gets carried over to the live site by mistake.

Do You Have Canonical Tags Set Up?

Canonical tags tell Google which version of a page is the “official” one when multiple URLs display the same or very similar content. Without canonical tags, you can end up with duplicate content issues that split your ranking signals across multiple URLs.

Common duplicate content scenarios on South African websites:

Both http:// and https:// versions of a URL are accessible
Both www. and non-www. versions are accessible
Printer-friendly or AMP versions of pages exist alongside the regular versions
Product pages accessible via multiple category paths (common in WooCommerce)
Paginated content where page 2 of a blog archive is very similar to page 1

WordPress SEO plugins like Rank Math handle canonical tags automatically in most cases. The important thing is to ensure you have one canonical version of every URL and that all traffic is directed to it.

Are Your 301 Redirects Set Up Correctly?

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that sends visitors (and Google) from one URL to another. They are essential in several situations:

When you change the URL of an existing page
When you delete a page and want to direct its traffic to a relevant replacement
When you migrate your site from an old domain to a new one
When you change your URL structure

Without proper 301 redirects, deleted or renamed pages return 404 errors. These are dead ends for both visitors and Google crawlers. More importantly, when you change a URL without redirecting the old one, you lose all the ranking value that the old URL had built up.

In WordPress, the Redirection plugin is a reliable way to manage 301 redirects without touching server configuration files. Rank Math also includes redirect management.

After any site migration or redesign, audit your redirects. Make sure every old URL that had meaningful traffic or ranking value has a redirect pointing to the appropriate new URL.

Do You Have Schema Markup on Your Site?

Schema markup (also called structured data) is code added to your website that helps Google understand what your content means, not just what it says. It is covered in more detail in our schema markup guide but deserves mention here as a technical SEO element.

For most South African business websites, the most important schema types are:

LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone number, and opening hours
WebSite schema with a Sitelinks search box if you have an internal search function
BreadcrumbList schema for site navigation structure
FAQPage schema if you have FAQ sections (can display directly in search results)

Use Google’s Rich Results Test at search.google.com/test/rich-results to check what schema is currently on your site and whether it is valid.

Getting your technical SEO foundations right makes everything else you do more effective. If you want a professional audit of your website’s technical SEO, our SEO Rescue service is a good starting point - it identifies the specific issues holding your site back and provides a clear plan to fix them.

Rather have the technical SEO handled for you? Our SEO services cover the full checklist. Request a quote and we will audit and fix your site.

Want a professional to assess the whole site? Our website consulting and audit covers SEO, speed and conversion in one report.

Frequently Asked Questions About Technical SEO

Can I do technical SEO myself or do I need a developer?

Some technical SEO tasks are straightforward enough for non-developers, particularly on WordPress: installing an SEO plugin that generates sitemaps and canonical tags, compressing images before uploading them, and installing a caching plugin. But other tasks - fixing crawl errors, setting up server-level redirects, resolving Core Web Vitals issues, or troubleshooting JavaScript rendering problems - typically require developer involvement. A good approach is to audit what is wrong first, then decide which fixes you can handle and which need professional help.

How do I check if Google can crawl my website?

Google Search Console (searchconsole.google.com) is the definitive tool for this. The Coverage or Indexing report shows you which pages Google has indexed and which it has not, along with the reasons why unindexed pages were excluded. You can also use the URL Inspection tool to check any specific page and see how Google views it. Setting up Search Console should be one of the first things you do for any South African business website - it is free and the data it provides is invaluable.