Website Success Checklist: A 20-Point Audit for Rankings and Conversions
This is the same checklist I actually run through when a client’s site is getting real traffic but not enough of it, or getting traffic and not enough of anything happening once it lands. Twenty-three checks, split into four categories, technical foundation, SEO fundamentals, content depth, and conversion. Go through it honestly and you’ll know exactly which of the four is actually broken, instead of guessing.
You don’t need to fix all twenty today. Tick as you go, it saves in your browser, so you can come back and pick up where you left off.
These four categories aren’t random. They map to the same four layers I use to diagnose every website I work on, worked through in order, since a problem in an earlier layer usually explains symptoms you’d otherwise blame on a later one.
Caching and asset issues (most of this section) → start with WP Rocket. Start with the fixes first, not the hosting decision — it’s very often not the actual problem. But if you’ve fixed caching and images and that server-response line still isn’t ticked, hosting is genuinely your bottleneck, not plugins — read what that actually looks like when you test it properly, and if it turns out to be real, here’s what I found switching to Cloudways.
This is the Content layer — structure, keyword targeting, internal linking. Rank Math handles the technical side of this (schema, sitemaps, on-page signals), but no plugin fixes cannibalisation or thin content on its own — that’s editorial work.
Rough scoring: sixteen or more ticked, you’re in decent shape and probably just need to polish the gaps. Ten to fifteen, you’ve likely got one whole category that’s mostly broken. Under ten, start with Technical Foundation first, since the other three categories don’t matter much if Google and your visitors can’t actually load the page properly.
Where to Go From Here
If most of your unticked boxes sit in Technical Foundation or SEO Fundamentals, that’s covered properly in the Fix SEO Rankings hub, and speed specifically gets its own full breakdown on the Fix Website Speed page.
If Technical Foundation is mostly ticked but that server-response line specifically isn’t, your bottleneck has moved. Caching and images aren’t the problem anymore — the ceiling is your server itself. That’s a genuinely different fix than anything else on this page, and it’s worth reading the real numbers before spending money on it: My TTFB Was Fine, My Site Was Still Slow and Cloudways Review: What Actually Happens When Caching Isn’t Enough.
If it’s mostly Conversion that’s unticked, the Fix Conversions diagnostic guide covers tracking, form friction, and layout bugs in more depth than there’s room for here.
And if you want to see what this checklist actually looks like applied to real sites, not just described in the abstract, the case studies page walks through it project by project.
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