The choices that decide rankings are made in the wireframe, not the style guide.
Palette and type affect trust. Architecture, URLs, templates and redirects decide whether a page can be found at all.
Keep money pages within three clicks of the homepage. Anything five levels down gets crawled last and refreshed least.
No dates, no IDs, no category in the path. A URL has to survive a rebrand, a CMS swap and three redesigns.
One H1, a distinct title, a real meta description, a schema slot. If the template has no slot for it, nobody adds it later.
Cutting the nav from 30 links to 8 is the most common cause of the traffic drop that follows a redesign.
Server-render anything you want indexed. LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 — a design can blow the budget before a word is written.
A subdirectory shares your domain's authority. A subdomain starts from zero. Someone else's platform keeps the links you earn.
One-to-one 301s, written during design. A blanket redirect to the homepage is treated as a soft 404.
The full checklist, with the launch-day list and the FAQ.