Website Features Checklist: 85 Must-Haves for Your Site, Including Technical SEO and AI Visibility

Wow. I love it when someone designs a checklist that’s both simple and informative. UK Web Host Review designed the original infographic at the bottom of this article to list the features they believe every business website should include. I’ve expanded it considerably over the years, and this update adds two areas that didn’t exist as disciplines when the list began: technical SEO and AI visibility.

Overall, it’s absolutely imperative that your website meets the purpose you’re investing in: to drive business. Every visitor should land with intent, find the information they need, be led to a conversion, and give you the notifications and reporting you need to keep optimizing the site.

Too many companies are overly focused on design. A beautiful design creates the immediate impact you want, but unless the site is actually working and driving sales, it’s not worth the investment. Conversely, agencies often don’t offer all of the features your site needs to be successful. Conversion, search, AI, and social optimization shouldn’t be add-ons; they should be baselines for any website project.

Today, a growing share of your prospects never see your site first. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, or Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and those systems decide whether your brand is cited. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) build on the same technical foundation as SEO, so the features below work together.

A website features checklist is a list of the components every business site needs, from the header, content, and conversion elements visitors see to the technical SEO, performance, security, and AI visibility features that let search engines and AI assistants crawl, understand, and cite the site.

Anatomy of a High-Performing Website

Before the list, here’s where the visible features live on a typical page. The numbers match the checklist below.

Page Header

1. Domain name: Easy to read and remember. A .com extension is still premium because it’s what people assume, but newer extensions (like .zone here) are widely accepted, and a short domain on another extension can beat a long .com with dashes. Check domain auctions before settling for a new registration.
2. Logo: A professional, unique representation of your business. Logo design is an art form requiring contrast, recognition at any size, and colors that suit your audience. Link it to your home page, since visitors expect that.
3. Tagline: A concise description of the benefit you deliver, not a feature list. Cuts grease is perfect for Dawn. Realize your return on technology investment works far better for DK New Media than a list of integrations.
4. Click-to-call phone number: A clickable and trackable phone number (and make sure you answer). Most visitors are on mobile, and nobody wants to copy and paste a number.
5. Call to action: Every page needs a CTA. I recommend a call to action button at the top right of your navigation so the next step is always visible.
6. Top navigation: Discrete options for your most important pages. Mega menus can overwhelm visitors; I’ve seen engagement climb on sites where we cut navigation to a fraction of what it was.
7. Breadcrumb navigation: Helps visitors move up a hierarchy and helps search engines understand your site structure. It’s especially valuable for e-commerce sites with many categories and product SKUs.

Above the Fold

8. Hero video, image, or slider: Visually communicate your unique selling points. Keep it lightweight: a heavy hero is the most common cause of a slow Largest Contentful Paint.
9. Reviews and testimonials: Social proof answers two questions: can you do what you say, and what’s the evidence? Include a photo, name, title, and company. Video testimonials are even better.
10. Important business information: Location, service area, hours, and the best way to reach you. If location matters to your business, include it in title tags and show a map.

Below the Fold

With modern screens, the fold differs on every device. Don’t be afraid of long pages; we’ve tested long, well-organized pages that outperform pages forcing visitors to click for information.

11. Quality content: Your unique selling proposition described for visitors, search engines, and AI assistants alike.
12. Main features: The key features and benefits of your products and services.
13. Internal links: Contextual links to your inner pages that distribute authority and help crawlers discover content.
14. Jump links: Bookmarks or a table of contents that let visitors jump to the section they need. Search engines sometimes surface these as links in results.

Footer

15. Accessibility: Build to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA. The European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce and other consumer services since June 28, 2025, and in California, the Unruh Act allows minimum damages of $4,000 per violation. Tools like AccessiBe can help, but no overlay alone guarantees compliance; the FTC fined AccessiBe $1 million in 2025 for claiming otherwise. Pair automated tools with a manual audit, and publish an accessibility statement in your footer.
16. Secondary navigation: Links to common pages, policies, and resources.
17. Social media links: Help people find and follow you on the channels you’re active on.
18. Chat or AI assistant: Instant answers while visitors research. Modern AI chat agents can answer from your own content, qualify leads, and route requests around the clock, with a human handoff when needed.
19. Business hours: Display them for visitors and mark them up in your structured data so search engines, maps, and AI assistants show them correctly.
20. Contact information: Physical and mailing addresses, phone number, and email. Keep your name, address, and phone (NAP) identical everywhere it appears online. Be careful publishing a raw email address, since crawlers harvest them for spam.

Inner Pages

21. About us page: Tell your story, introduce your team, and show the credentials that make you trustworthy.
22. Product and service pages: One detailed page per key offering, so each can rank and be cited on its own.
23. Contact form: Let visitors know when to expect a response, and route submissions to your CRM.
24. Spam protection: Bots constantly submit forms. Use an invisible challenge like Cloudflare Turnstile or Google reCAPTCHA rather than a frustrating puzzle.
25. Privacy policy, terms, and consent: Explain how you collect and use data, and use a consent management platform (CMP) where privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA apply. Your best bet is to talk to an attorney.
26. FAQ page: Frequently asked questions about your products and services. Clear question-and-answer pairs are also some of the easiest content for AI assistants to quote. See our FAQ glossary entry.
27. Blog: Company news, industry insights, advice, and client stories that build authority and attract organic and AI traffic.

Blog Features

28. Comments or discussion: Increase engagement, and moderate them to keep spam out.
29. Site search: Make it easy for visitors to find what they’re seeking. Search queries also reveal content gaps.
30. Sidebar or related posts: Show popular or related articles and a call to action to keep readers moving.
31. Social share buttons: Let readers easily share your articles.

Content and Design

32. Readable fonts: Choose a clean typeface at a comfortable size; it’s common to pair a sans-serif heading font with a highly legible body font.
33. Recognizable links: Colors, underlines, or buttons that make it obvious what’s clickable.
34. Mobile responsive design: Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so it must look and work great on a phone.
35. Mobile menu: A simple, thumb-friendly menu on small screens.
36. Contrasting colors: Text and background contrast that meets WCAG minimums.
37. Spell and grammar checking: Typos erode trust. We love Grammarly!

Conversion and Engagement

38. Newsletter signup: Many visitors aren’t ready to buy but will subscribe to stay in touch. Email capture is critical for every business.
39. Landing pages: Dedicated destination pages for each campaign and call to action, integrated with your CRM and marketing automation platform. Read: 9 Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid
40. Video: From explainers to testimonials, many visitors who won’t read will watch. Embed it with a poster image and click-to-play so it doesn’t slow the page (see item 80). Read: Why Product Video is a Priority
41. Podcast: Interview prospects, capture client stories, and build authority. Read: Why Companies Are Podcasting
42. Map and Google Business Profile: Claim your Google Business Profile (GBP) and embed a map on your contact page.
43. Logo bar: If you’re a B2B company, show the brands you work with. We built an image rotator widget for this very reason.
44. Premium resources: Infographics, white papers, research, and case studies that attract visitors and give them a reason to share their contact information.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO makes sure search engines can crawl, render, understand, and index every page you want found. These features are also the foundation AI search depends on, since most AI answers are grounded in a search index.

45. Title tags and meta descriptions: Unique, descriptive titles and compelling descriptions on every page to earn the click.
46. XML sitemap: Generated automatically and submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Use IndexNow, supported by Bing, Yandex, and others, to notify engines of updates instantly.
47. Clean URL structure: Short, readable URLs without query strings or numbers are easier to share and to click.
48. Robots.txt: Tell crawlers what they can access and where to find your sitemap. Read: What is Search Engine Optimization?
49. Canonical tags: Point duplicate or parameterized versions of a page to the preferred URL so ranking signals aren’t split.
50. Structured data: Schema.org markup in JSON-LD for your organization, local business, products, articles, breadcrumbs, and reviews. It helps search engines understand your entities and can earn rich results.
51. Social sharing tags: Open Graph (OG) and X card tags control the title, description, and image when your page is shared or previewed.
52. Core Web Vitals: Google’s page experience metrics (CWV): Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Monitor them with PageSpeed Insights and the Search Console report.
53. Crawlable, semantic HTML: Make sure your important content is in the HTML the server delivers, and mark it up semantically. Use landmark elements (<header>, <nav>, <main>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and <footer>), one H1 with a logical H2 and H3 hierarchy, <button> for actions and <a> for navigation, and <figure> with <figcaption> for images and charts. Semantic markup lets screen readers jump between regions without extra ARIA roles, and helps search engines and AI parsers separate your main content from navigation and boilerplate. Server-side rendering (SSR) helps because many AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript, so content that only appears after client-side rendering may be invisible to them.
54. Redirects and 404 handling: Use 301 redirects when URLs change, fix broken links, and serve a helpful 404 page that returns a true 404 status.
55. Hreflang for multilingual sites: If you serve multiple languages or regions, HREFLANG tags show search engines which version to present to each audience.
56. Image SEO: Descriptive file names and alt text on every image, which help accessibility, image search, and AI understanding.

Google assesses each metric at the 75th percentile of real page loads, on mobile and desktop separately.

AI Visibility

AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, AI assistants and AI search features mention and cite your brand. Google states that SEO best practices remain the foundation for its generative AI features, but there are additional features worth adding so that large language models (LLMs) and their crawlers can access, understand, and trust your content.

57. An AI crawler policy: Decide which AI bots may access your site in robots.txt, and make sure your firewall or CDN isn’t blocking the ones you want. Each platform separates training from search, so you can opt out of training and still appear in AI answers.
58. Answer-first content: Start key sections with a direct, self-contained answer or definition, then provide detail. Question-style headings mirror how people prompt AI assistants.
59. Non-commodity content: Original research, data, opinions, and first-hand experience that AI systems can’t find elsewhere. Google’s guidance specifically emphasizes non-commodity content for its generative AI features.
60. Organization and entity markup: Organization schema with your logo, contact details, and sameAs links to your official profiles, so AI systems connect your brand to the right entity.
61. Author pages and expertise: Bylines, bios, and credentials that demonstrate experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
62. Visible publish and update dates: AI assistants favor current information. Display and mark up when content was last updated, and actually refresh it.
63. Consistent third-party presence: AI answers draw on reviews, directories, forums, and publications. Keep profiles accurate and earn mentions on sites AI systems cite.
64. Snippet controls: Use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, or max-snippet to limit what Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode can show from a page, rather than blocking it.
65. An llms.txt file (optional): A Markdown summary of your site for AI agents. Google Search ignores it, and no major AI platform has confirmed using it for ranking, but Chrome Lighthouse includes it in an experimental agentic browsing audit. It’s low effort if you want it.
66. AI referral tracking: Segment traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, and similar referrers in Google Analytics (GA4) to measure what AI visibility is worth.
67. AI visibility monitoring: Track how often AI assistants mention and cite you versus competitors with tools like Semrush AI Visibility, Profound, Peec AI, or Ahrefs Brand Radar.

Here are the major AI crawlers and what each robots.txt token controls:

Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from Google Search, AI Overviews, or AI Mode, and blocking a training bot like GPTBot doesn’t remove you from ChatGPT search. Note that user-requested fetchers such as ChatGPT-User may not follow robots.txt.

Hosting, Performance, and Security

68. Content management system: It’s impossible to compete with today’s CMS platforms by writing your own. Look for a CMS with great SEO capabilities, like WordPress.
69. Automatic backups: Nightly, off-site, and easy to restore. Test a restore occasionally.
70. SSL and HTTPS: A valid SSL certificate and HTTPS on every page, with HSTS enabled. Browsers flag insecure pages.
71. Content delivery network: A content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare serves pages from locations near your visitors and absorbs traffic spikes.
72. Page and server caching: Will your site keep up with tens of thousands of visitors a day? Full-page and object caching keep it fast under load.
73. Optimized code: Lean themes, few plugins, and minimal third-party scripts reduce server load and improve INP.
74. Media compression: An image compression service and modern formats like WebP and AVIF speed up loading without spoiling quality.
75. Lazy loading: Load offscreen images, video, and embeds only when needed, but never lazy load the hero image.
76. Web application firewall and bot management: A WAF and bot rules protect against attacks, scrapers, and DDoS traffic without blocking the search and AI crawlers you want.
77. Uptime and error monitoring: Get alerted when the site, a form, or checkout goes down before customers tell you.
78. Analytics and tag management: Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager (GTM), with conversions and events configured.
79. Cross-browser testing: Verify your site works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, on desktop and mobile.

Things to Avoid

80. Heavy, auto-loading video players: Embedded players from YouTube, Vimeo, and others load hundreds of kilobytes of scripts before anyone presses play. Instead, show a lightweight, compressed poster image (a facade) with a play button, and load the player only when the visitor clicks. Use a privacy-enhanced or lite embed such as youtube-nocookie.com or lite-youtube, set preload="none" on any native video, give each video a descriptive title, and include captions.
81. Background music and autoplay audio: Nobody wants your site to start talking or playing music.
82. Intrusive pop-ups: Interstitials that cover content on mobile frustrate visitors and can hurt rankings.
83. Click-to-enter splash pages: Unless legally required, such as age verification, don’t make visitors click to get into your site.
84. Stolen content: Never use content, images, or other assets you don’t have rights to.
85. Confidential information: Never expose private client, employee, or internal data, including in files that crawlers can find.

Flash, once a staple of this list, reached end of life on December 31, 2020, and Facebook Instant Articles were discontinued in 2023, so neither belongs on a modern website.

Website Features Checklist Infographic