Start with the pages that matter
Start with discovery, not a score. An audit is not a hunt for a perfect number. I start with the routes that carry the business: the homepage, a category or service page, a product or article page, and any important conversion route. I check how those pages are linked, whether their canonicals agree with the sitemap, and what a crawler receives before JavaScript finishes running.
Then I compare the intended site structure with the one a search engine can actually reach. That difference is usually more useful than a long list of warnings.
- Map the route types that bring people to the site
- Check canonicals, redirects, robots rules and sitemap coverage together
- Inspect rendered HTML on representative pages
- Give every finding an owner, a change and a verification step
Turn a symptom into a ticket
“Improve LCP” is a diagnosis, not a task. A useful ticket names the affected template, the evidence, the likely cause, the proposed change and the check that will prove it worked. For example: serve the hero image at its rendered size, preload the selected source, defer the carousel bundle, then rerun the same mobile profile.
Recheck the page, not just the report
After a change, I rerun the same URL and device profile, then spot-check the production HTML, keyboard path, schema output and network requests. I keep the before artifact. A fix is finished when the affected page behaves better and the reason is clear—not when a dashboard happens to turn green.