Comprehensive Blogging Checklist

Why your blog posts die at publish time (and what to do about it)

I spent three years running a technical blog before I figured out that the problem wasn't writing quality. It was the mess between the first draft and the live URL. I had posts go out with broken images, missing meta descriptions, wrong canonical tags, and schema markup that conflicted with itself. Each one cost me visibility I didn't know I was losing until the analytics caught up. The Comprehensive Blogging Checklist is nothing fancy. It's a pre-publish sequence that catches the stupid stuff before it hits the internet. What makes it useful isn't the format — it's the fact that you actually follow it every single time, even when you've published the same topic seventeen times before.

Comprehensive Blogging Checklist: what goes in it

Here's the version I ended up using after my editor quit and I had to handle everything myself: Technical health checks. Page loads under three seconds on 4G. Images are WebP or AVIF, lazy-loaded where it makes sense. Canonical URL is correct and points to itself, not a parameterized version. Open Graph and Twitter card tags have actual content, not placeholders. Robots meta isn't set to noindex unless you deliberately want it hidden. Structured data is valid on Google's Rich Results test — and I mean valid, not just present. I once had FAQ schema throwing errors because I pasted the JSON-LD without escaping the quotes inside the answer strings. Took me forty minutes to find because the page looked fine in the browser. Content integrity. All links resolve without redirects. No 404s in the body. Internal links point to relevant, living pages, not category hubs that haven't been updated since 2022. Headings follow a logical hierarchy — H2, then H3, not H2, then H5 because you skipped a level. Readability is passable for the target audience. Grammar and spelling are clean, or at least consistent with the voice you're going for.

SEO basics that actually move the needle. Title tag under sixty characters. Meta description under one hundred fifty and written like a human would click it, not like a robot trying to hit a keyword density target. Primary keyword appears in the first paragraph, the H2, and the URL slug. Secondary keywords are woven into subheadings where they fit naturally. Images have alt text that describes the content, not the file name. The post isn't thin — if someone reads it once, they shouldn't need to visit three other pages to get the answer. Legal and accessibility. Cookie consent banner is functioning if you're in a jurisdiction that requires it. Images have appropriate licensing. Any third-party embeds (YouTube, tweets, code snippets from other sites) have permission or fall under fair use. The color contrast passes WCAG AA at minimum. Keyboard navigation works through the article if someone's tabbing through.

How I built mine (and why the first version was terrible)

My first checklist was a Google Doc with sixty-seven items. I abandoned it after four posts because I couldn't be bothered to open it every time. The turning point was when I integrated the checklist into the publishing workflow itself — not as a separate document, but as a template in the CMS or a markdown file that lives next to each post. Now the checklist is a static file I clone for every new post. It has the universal items filled in and the post-specific items blank. When I'm done writing, I go through it once, checking items off. It takes maybe eight minutes for a standard post, fifteen for something heavy with diagrams and schema. That's it. No ceremony. No elaborate approval chain. The trick is keeping it short enough that you actually use it. If the checklist is longer than the editing pass, you'll stop using it. I keep mine around forty items. Anything I find myself adding repeatedly is a sign that the process before the checklist needs fixing, not that the checklist needs growing.

Common mistakes I see people make with this

Making it a one-time thing. The checklist only works if it's followed every time. A single missed item on a high-traffic post can tank your credibility faster than any bad review. I stopped treating it as optional after a competitor published the same topic two days before mine with better structured data and faster load times. They beat me to rich results because they'd baked the checklist into their CI pipeline. Checking boxes without understanding why. Having an OG image at 1200 by 630 pixels means nothing if the text overlay is illegible at mobile size. Having schema markup means nothing if it describes the wrong content type. I've seen people run the Google test, get a green checkmark, and move on without verifying that the structured data actually matches what's on the page. It's a common blind spot and one that tools don't catch. Forgetting about updates. A post that passes the checklist at publish time will drift. Links rot. Images disappear. Schema becomes stale as the content evolves. I schedule a quarterly review for anything that gets more than a thousand impressions per month. The ones that don't get traffic don't need the maintenance.

Over-relying on plugins. WordPress has plugins for SEO, schema, performance, and accessibility. Each one adds dependencies and potential failure points. My rule is simple: if a plugin can do it manually in five minutes or less, I do it manually. The plugins stay for the complex stuff — canonical management, sitemap generation, schema validation. Everything else gets hardcoded or templated so I know exactly what's happening.

A practical example from last month

I published a post about Redis persistence mechanisms. The draft was solid, the testing environment looked good, and I was ready to push. Then I ran the checklist and found that the embedded benchmark table had broken column alignment on mobile. Not a critical failure, but it made the data hard to read on the device most of my readers were using. I also caught that one internal link to a post about Redis clustering was pointing to the old URL before I'd migrated the site structure. The redirect was working, but the checklist item for direct links forced me to update it rather than accept the redirect chain. Both fixes took about twelve minutes total. Without the checklist, I would have published both issues and probably wouldn't have noticed for weeks.

Where this approach breaks down

Checklists don't replace editorial judgment. They catch mechanical errors, not bad ideas. A post can pass every item on this list and still be irrelevant to the audience, poorly structured, or covering a topic that's already saturated. The checklist is a floor, not a ceiling. It also doesn't scale well for teams without version control. If five people are publishing posts and each one has a slightly different checklist, you're not actually standardizing anything. The solution is a shared template in a repository, not a doc that gets emailed around. Finally, there's the maintenance cost. Every tool, platform, and best practice changes. This checklist will need updating every six to twelve months as Google adjusts its algorithms, browsers drop support for old formats, and accessibility standards evolve. I treat it as living documentation, not something you write once and forget.

The file itself is around forty items split into five sections. I keep mine in a public GitHub repo if you want to adapt it — it's not proprietary, it's just what survived three years of iteration. Search for comprehensive blogging checklist on my profile if you need a starting point.