SEO checklist

Before anything else: are you looking at the right address? Your free ClickWhale address is kept out of search results. Every page on it is noindex, its robots.txt blocks everything, and it has no sitemap. None of the checks below mean anything there. Do them on your own domain. See Your free address.

Once per website

• Connect your own domain, and make it the main domain. Until you do, nothing on your site is indexable at all. → Connecting a domain
• Check indexing is switched on. Allow search index and Allow following under Settings → Website settings. Both are on by default; the time to check is after a site has been through several hands. → Website settings
• Set a 404 page, so a wrong address lands somewhere useful instead of nowhere. → Website settings
• Verify the site with Google and Bing, under Settings → Analytics and verification. → Measuring your visitors
• Set up analytics, so you can tell later whether any of this worked. Same page. → Measuring your visitors
• Fill in your organization details and social media profiles, so search engines and AI assistants know who is behind the site. → Organization details and social media profiles
• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. It's generated for you and always current. → Meta title, description and share image
• Turn on the cookie bar if you use analytics or any tracking. → The cookie bar
• Publish. Settings changes reach the live site through a publish. → Publishing

Once per page

• A meta title. It's what shows in search results. Around 50–60 characters, saying what the page is, with your business name at the end if it fits. An empty one falls back to the page name. → Meta title, description and share image
• A meta description. Around 150–160 characters. It isn't a ranking factor, but it's the sentence that decides whether anyone clicks. There is no fallback: leave it empty and search engines invent one from your page.
• A share image, for when the page is posted to social media or a chat app.
• A readable address. /opening-hours, not /page-2. Set it when you create the page, because changing it later means setting up a redirect. → Creating and managing pages
• One H1 that says what the page is about, and headings below it in order. → Accessibility basics
• Real text on the page. Text inside an image can't be read by a search engine, a translator or a screen reader.
• Alt text on images that carry meaning. ⚠ The Image element has no alt text field; the photo slider and photo gallery do. → Accessibility basics
• Link text that means something on its own. "Download the price list", not "click here".
• Internal links to your other pages, using the page picker rather than a typed URL, so they survive a rename. → Buttons and links

Once per article, if you have a blog

• Title, summary and image. Blog articles have no metadata fields of their own. ClickWhale builds the meta title, meta description and share image from these three. The summary does double duty: it's also the whole of what an RSS subscriber reads. → Writing and publishing an article
• Check the article's address. It's built from the title, so renaming an article moves it.
• Decide your categories before you have forty articles. A category belongs to one language, can't be changed on an article afterwards, and ⚠ renaming one moves its RSS feed with no redirect. → Organising articles into categories

Whenever you change an address

• Set up a redirect from the old address to the new one. Nothing does this for you, and a page that changes address without one loses whatever standing it had. → URL redirects
• Remember that redirects take effect within a minute of saving, no publish needed, and that a redirect is checked before the page lookup, so one pointing at a live page's address makes that page unreachable.

Page speed

• Prepare images before uploading. The single biggest thing you control. → Preparing images before you upload them
• Keep third-party embeds down. A YouTube video, a map and a tag manager on one page cost more than all your photographs together.
• Check a page on a phone, on mobile data, not just on your desk.

Things ClickWhale does for you

You don't need to do any of these:

• sitemap.xml is generated and always current. It lists your pages with a last-modified date and hreflang alternates for other languages, and your blog articles, and it leaves out members-only pages.
• robots.txt is generated and allows crawling on your own domain, with a pointer to your sitemap.
• llms.txt is generated: a summary of your site for AI assistants, listing the same pages and articles as the sitemap.
• Language tags. On a multi-language site every URL carries its language prefix and every page declares its language.
• Canonical addresses. Every page tells search engines its one real address, without extras such as ?utm_source=..., and once your main domain is live the free address redirects to it permanently, so the same page is never counted at two addresses.
• Structured data. Your homepage tells search engines who is behind the site, from your organization details. Every blog article tells them its title, date and image, and where it sits on your site.

What ClickWhale doesn't do

• No keyword research, no scoring, no "SEO score" panel. There is no traffic-light widget in the builder telling you a page is 78% optimised.
• No automatic alt text.
• No other structured data. Markup for an event, a recipe or an FAQ goes in as custom code. → Site-wide custom code
• No redirect is created when you rename a page. Add one yourself; see above.

Recommended order

1. Domain connected and made main.
2. Indexing on, 404 page set, verification done, publish.
3. Sitemap submitted to Search Console.
4. Meta title and description on your five most important pages.
5. Images prepared and re-uploaded where they're heavy.
6. Everything else, page by page, when you next edit it.

Then leave it alone for a month. Search engines are slow, so don't change everything again a week later.

Common issues