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Thursday Website Technical Audit

Cadence: Weekly, Thursday Duration: ~30 minutes Trigger: "Run the Thursday tech audit" or "Website technical check" Deploys changes: May produce fixes (with approval)

Purpose

A weekly sweep of the firm's WordPress website for technical SEO health, code quality, and infrastructure issues. Catches drift and breakage before it affects rankings or user experience.

Audit Sections

1. Schema Validation

  • Check structured data on key pages (Attorney, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, LegalService)
  • Run schema through Google's Rich Results Test
  • Flag any pages with broken or missing schema
  • Verify FAQ schema on practice area pages
  • Check for duplicate schema issues

2. Sitemap Health

  • Validate sitemap.xml is accessible and well-formed
  • Count pages in sitemap vs pages in GSC
  • Flag pages in sitemap that return non-200 status
  • Flag important pages NOT in sitemap
  • Check sitemap last-modified dates

3. WPCode Snippet Status

  • Verify all active snippets are running
  • Check for snippet conflicts (multiple snippets on same hook)
  • Flag snippets that haven't been reviewed in 60+ days
  • Verify no snippet is injecting deprecated code

4. Image Audit

  • Scan for images missing alt text
  • Flag oversized images (>500KB) that need compression
  • Check for broken image links
  • Verify lazy loading is active on below-fold images
  • Check WebP/AVIF delivery

5. Redirect Health

  • Scan for redirect chains (A→B→C, should be A→C)
  • Scan for redirect loops
  • Check for soft 404s (pages that render but should redirect)
  • Verify critical redirects from old URLs are intact

6. CSS Audit

  • Check for unused CSS on key pages
  • Verify mobile responsiveness on new/changed pages
  • Flag any Kadence block override issues
  • Check Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP)

7. Page Speed Check

  • Run Lighthouse on homepage + top practice area pages
  • Flag any page scoring <70 on mobile
  • Identify top performance bottlenecks

Expected Output

A prioritized fix list: - P0 (fix today): broken schema, redirect loops, 500 errors - P1 (fix this week): missing alt text on high-traffic pages, oversized images - P2 (fix this month): CSS cleanup, minor speed optimizations