SEO Technical Checklist For Webflow Websites
Is Webflow good for website SEO? The answer is, quite simply, yes. Continue reading to learn more!
Technical SEO is the foundation of your SEO strategy. Webflow provides all the necessary tools to optimize the site structure and implement your on-page SEO strategy with ease. The purpose of this article is to provide a basic checklist to get started and explore the topic of technical SEO.
1. Responsive design
It’s never too much emphasizing the importance of responsive design. Content and layout must be correctly displayed on all devices, from large monitors to the iPhone SE (320px). Webflow allows you to adjust your design to correctly fit different breakpoints, as shown below.
In addition, it's recommended to test your web pages using the DevTools of your browser. Learn more about these tools on Chrome and Firefox.
2. Headings Structure
Set your Headings in the right hierarchy. Follow a logical sequence where Heading 1 (H1) is the main heading of the page. Each page must contain only one H1. The length of headings is also a relevant aspect to consider. According to moz.com, they should be of 50–60 characters.
In Webflow it’s super easy to set up your headings! Select the heading element, click the gear icon that appears right above it to open the settings panel and choose the correct type.
Most importantly, setting the proper heading type is very critical for accessibility, helping users that use screen readers to understand the structure of your content.
3. Site performance
Performance is one of the key indicators for search engine ranking. Google page speed is the most popular tool to check your website performance. You’ll notice that different tools will show different results. That's because each of those platforms may use different assessment parameters. In any case, there are some key aspects that you always need to consider as you build websites with a performance-driven approach.
Optimize Assets
Make sure you optimize your assets (images and media files) to improve website performance. The maximum image size allowed in Webflow is 2MB. However, it is highly recommended to reduce it as much as possible. Thanks to a recent update, when you upload an image on your project, it is set in lazy load mode by default which significantly impacts page load time.
Minify HTML, CSS, JS
An important aspect that improves website performance is HMTL, CSS, JS minification. It means that fewer bytes will be downloaded when users load up the page. You will find this section in Project Settings>Hosting.
Animations
Animations make our designs stand out and more engaging. As much as we love animations, we should be aware that they have a significant impact on page performance. Too many and complex animations require a lot of processing power from the browser that would slow down the page.
4. Title and meta descriptions
Meta tags provide information to search engines about a web page. You need to specify a Title tag and a Meta description that will typically be displayed on search engine results pages. However, this is not an absolute rule. In some cases, search engines might choose to ignore meta tags and display parts of the content on the page.
You can add the meta tags in the SEO Settings section within the Page Settings of your page as shown below.
Page settings can also be accessed from the Editor, which is a much efficient way for your clients to do it.
5. Open Graph Settings
Choose how you want a web page to be displayed on social media by specifying a title, description, and image. Webflow allows you to use the same title and description used in the SEO settings.
You can find the Open Graph section right below the SEO Settings both from the Designer and Editor.
Once the open graph settings are complete, make sure to check that they work correctly using the following tools:
- Facebook debugger https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
- Twitter card validator https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator/
- LinkedIn post inspector https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/
6. Image alt text
Set alt text to images from the Image Settings section. You can add a custom description, choose to use the Alt text from asset, or set the image as Decorative if it has no semantic value.
7. 404 page
The 404 page doesn’t directly impact SEO. On the other hand, setting up a unique error page allows you to have control over broken links and encourage users to continue browsing your site. On Webflow you can easily customize the error page located in the pages tab, under Utility Pages.
8. Favicon
Upload the favicon from Project Settings > General Settings, making sure the uploaded image is 32 x 32 pixel.
9. Set up redirects after deleting a page: 301
Use redirects whenever an old URL is replaced by a new one. This helps maintain SEO ranking and avoiding users to land on a broken link. You can find the 301 Redirects section under Project Settings>Hosting.
10. Disable subdomain indexing
When hosting is activated, make sure you disable indexing of the Webflow subdomain of your site from the project SEO settings.
11. Robots
Add robots if there are any pages in your project that you don’t want search engines to crawl/index. The Robots section is available in the Project Settings>SEO.
12. Sitemap
The sitemap is generated automatically in Webflow. Enable the switch as shown in the screenshot below to allow the sitemap to auto-update whenever you publish your project. The Sitemap section is available in the Project Settings>SEO.
13. Canonical tags on duplicated content
Webflow allows you to add a global canonical tag on your project SEO settings. To learn more about the impact of duplicate content on SEO and how to use canonical tags, explore Moz.com resources.
This section is available in the Project Settings>SEO.
14. Declare the language of the website
Set the language of your site to help search engines and browsers better understand your content. You can add the language code section under Project Settings>General>Localization.
15. Google Search Console
Set up Google Search Console to verify site ownership, have a better view of your site’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, and submit the Sitemap. Make sure you submit the Sitemap whenever you implement changes to your project.
16. Google Analytics
Set up Google Analytics to have a better view of your traffic and user’s behaviour. However, there are plenty of web analytics tools out there. Whichever you’re using, remember to add the proper Cookie solution in your project.
17. Add Schema Markup
Schema markup helps search engines better understand the content of your website and provide internet users with more informed search results. It’s powerful to use schema if you have a blog or news section on your website. Webflow allows you to automatically add the code from schema on each blog post. For more information on schema, check out Moz.com.
For more information on how to add schema on a Webflow site, read this detailed post from the forum: Schema.org — Structured data in Webflow.
18. Content
As technical SEO is essential to build the foundations for your SEO strategy, it’s not enough. What makes the difference in the long term is if you commit to regularly and strategically update your site and publish blog posts with valuable content.
