A client asked a fair question recently: how would they know their site had been done properly?
The honest answer at the time was that they’d have to take our word for it. That wasn’t good enough, so we wrote the standard down and now measure every site against it. Twenty-one checks, four categories.
Can it be found. Is robots.txt being served, does it point to a working sitemap, and is any search or AI crawler being blocked? Is there a file on the server quietly overriding what the SEO plugin thinks it’s publishing? Is the site accidentally telling search engines not to index it? Is the certificate valid and is anything still loading over an insecure connection?
Can it be understood. Exactly one business listing — not two, not none — carrying a real address or a real list of towns served, a phone number, hours and services, in the format search engines and AI assistants read.
Can it be quoted. A title that earns a click rather than saying “Homepage”. A description that reads like a sentence rather than a keyword list. One clear heading at the top of the page.
Does it actually work. No demo content left over from the theme. No placeholder phone numbers. No contact form that accepts messages and discards them. No broken images or dead links.
We ran it across every site we host. Nothing passed all twenty-one on the first pass, including ours. We worked through them until most did, and the ones that still have an open item have a named reason and an owner.
The useful part isn’t the list. It’s that it’s written down and dated, so “your site is set up properly” is a thing we can show you rather than a thing we say.