Technical SEO

Yes, but modestly. Google uses Core Web Vitals in its ranking systems as part of page experience, and it has said that good scores don’t guarantee top positions, because relevance comes first. Treat them as a tiebreaker rather than a lever. The stronger reason to fix them is commercial: a page that responds slowly or jumps while loading loses enquiries whatever its position.

Usually not. Google’s own guidance on crawl budget is aimed at very large sites, or sites where large numbers of pages change daily. A site with a few hundred pages is normally crawled in full. Small sites have crawl problems of a different kind, such as blocked resources, orphan pages or parameter URLs multiplying, and those are worth fixing whatever the size.

It means Google knows the URL exists but hasn’t crawled it yet. Google says this often happens when crawling at that moment looked likely to overload the server, so the visit was rescheduled. On many sites, though, the pattern points to weak internal links or too many low-value URLs competing for attention. Better links to the affected pages and fewer surplus URLs usually move them along.

A well-run migration usually keeps its rankings, though some fluctuation in the first weeks is normal. What protects them is a URL-by-URL redirect map, content and internal links that survive the move, a record of rankings and traffic before launch, and checks straight after. Migrations go wrong when everything is redirected to the homepage, old URLs are skipped, or a redesign quietly removes content.

Only if the server was the bottleneck. A slow server response delays everything after it, including the main content, so moving off overloaded shared hosting can help. But most slow pages are slow because of what they load: images, scripts and fonts. I check server response times in field data first, so hosting only changes when the numbers point to it.

It depends on whether they serve a search intent. A WordPress category page that introduces a topic and links to its best articles can be worth indexing. Tag archives that list the same posts in a different order rarely are, so they’re usually noindexed or switched off. Author and date archives on a single-author site add nothing and are best disabled entirely.

Not in themselves. Google treats 404s as a normal part of the web, and they don’t harm the rest of the site. They matter when the missing URL had backlinks, traffic or internal links pointing at it, because a redirect to the closest equivalent recovers that value. A report full of URLs that never existed, such as malformed links from other sites, can safely be ignored.

It means Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of your pages and ranks them on that version. If the mobile layout hides content, drops internal links or leaves out structured data that the desktop version has, those things are effectively missing. Responsive sites that serve the same HTML to every device rarely have a problem. Separate mobile templates are where gaps usually appear.

Yes, and they should be. A staging copy lets me crawl the new version, compare it with the live site and catch broken canonicals, missing redirects or blocked resources before visitors or search engines meet them. Staging should be password-protected rather than just noindexed, and the launch checklist always confirms that no staging block has been carried over to the live site.