Your first technical audit: a starting checklist

Follow the path from discovery to a usable page.

• Check that important URLs return the intended HTTP status.
  
• Review robots.txt rules and page-level robots directives.
  
• Compare canonical tags with the URLs you want indexed.
  
• Make sure XML sitemaps contain useful, accessible canonical pages.
  
• Inspect internal links and avoid unnecessary redirect chains.
  
• Check whether essential content is available to search crawlers.
  
• Use Search Console inspection reports to investigate individual examples.
  

Prioritize issues by the pages affected and the likely business impact. Add evidence and a verification step to each proposed fix.

For a store, I would sample templates rather than only the most popular URLs. Include a category, a product, a variant selection, an empty filter and a sold-out product.

The audit should identify whether each issue is a one-page problem or a shared template problem. That distinction often changes both the priority and the person who needs to implement the fix.