What to Check After You Have Admired the Facade

I built a listings site in one day. Photos, several languages, a language switcher, a clean layout. It looked finished.

Twelve days later I asked for my home page the way a robot asks: without running scripts. The body of the page held 17 characters of text. A listing page held 23. The About page held 23. All the descriptions sat in a JavaScript file and were filled in by the browser. A person saw the whole site. A bot saw the frame.

The head of the page did carry markup with the price, the area and the address. So the bot had a product card and none of the words the site was made for.

A good facade hides what is under it, from the owner too. Below is what I now check myself, with no developer and no paid tools. Start with the basics. They are missed more often than you would think.

One H1 per page. Open the page, press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) and search for <h1. There should be one, and it should say what the page is about. If there is none, or three, the heading was probably made with a font size instead of markup. The eye cannot tell. A robot can.
Text in paragraphs, and readable. Read the page aloud. Are there paragraphs? Do the headings follow the meaning? Is it one solid block? Switch on the reading mode of your browser. If the page turns into nothing, or into scraps, the markup is the problem.
Your text is in the source. Same Ctrl+U. Search for any phrase from the page. If it is not there and a script puts it in, a search engine or a language model may not see it. That was my case, for every description.
Title and description differ, and are about this page. Identical ones on every page tell the robot that you published one text many times.
The sitemap opens. Open /sitemap.xml and follow the addresses. Do they all open? Is any extra, or missing?
Every figure has a source and a date. Take any claim with a number, for example "320 sunny days". Where does it come from, and when was it checked? A number with a retrieval date is better than one without, and it cannot go stale: the reader sees which period it covers.
All languages live one life. Go through each language in turn. Mine drifted: the order of the buttons, the footer, and a block of links that three languages did not have in their templates at all. A one-language site does not break like this. A multilingual one breaks quietly.
Who each text is for. In one project where I work on content, the brief was filled in, the topic agreed, the work accepted. The articles were written for buyers and published on an account read by specialists. The fields were full, but nobody had asked "for whom" in a way that made a wrong answer obvious. Ask it about every page of your site.

An evening is enough for all of it. Look at the site as someone who cannot see the layout.