"Technical SEO" sounds like it requires a terminal and a nervous twitch. In practice, most of it is checking whether your site does four boring things reliably. If you can send an email and read a chart, you can do this.
1. Can Google see your pages?
Two switch-flips block whole sites by accident: a noindex tag left on by a plugin, and a robots.txt rule that disallows important folders. Check both once. Then use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on your five most important pages — it renders the page the way Google sees it and states, in plain words, whether the page can be indexed.
2. How fast does it load?
Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and a typical article. Ignore the score theatrics; read the three Core Web Vitals. The usual culprits behind slow sites are not exotic: an oversized hero image, six fonts, and a chat widget that loads on every page whether you use it or not. Each of those has a settings-level fix.
3. Do the right pages exist in the sitemap?
Open yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. It should list content pages, not tag archives, filtered URLs or PDFs nobody reads. If you spot hundreds of thin pages, that's a real finding — those pages dilute crawling and can drag perceived quality down.
4. Does one URL own each piece of content?
Duplicate content usually isn't a penalty; it's a split vote. If http://, https://, www and non-www all serve the same page, pick one canonical version and redirect the rest. A site-wide check: search site:yoursite.com and see whether URLs appear in more than one format.
Your monthly ten minutes
Put a recurring reminder on the calendar. Once a month: Search Console errors page, one PageSpeed run, sitemap glance, and the URL inspection of anything new. That's the whole routine. It catches 80% of technical problems years before they become losses — and you never had to touch a line of code.
