Richard RamDigital Consultant

SEO for Static Sites: What an Ahrefs Checklist Found on My Own Site

I ran Ahrefs' eight static-site SEO problems against this site, then PageSpeed Insights. What it found, what changed, and a five-step check for any static site.

By Richard Ram · · 2 min read

PageSpeed Insights mobile performance score rising from 91 before to 96 after

Ahrefs recently published a useful piece by Despina Gavoyannis: SEO for Static Sites: 8 Problems to Watch For. Her core point is simple. A CMS like WordPress quietly handles a lot of SEO plumbing through plugins. On a static site that work is yours, and if AI is writing the code, it won't necessarily apply your conventions consistently across every page.

I had just moved this site off Squarespace to Astro on Cloudflare, so I used it as a test. I handed the article to Claude and asked it to check the site against each of the eight problems.

What It Found

Nothing serious, but three things were worth fixing:

  • URL format. A few internal links and redirects pointed at addresses without the trailing slash, so each click went through an extra redirect. Every link now points straight at the final address.
  • Images. Logos, my photo and the header image were converted to WebP, roughly halving their weight (about 476KB down to 230KB).
  • Fonts and caching. Fonts now load from the site itself rather than Google Fonts, and files that don't change are cached for longer.

The rest already passed: missing pages return a real 404, the sitemap leaves out noindex pages, and the structured data validates without errors.

Then PageSpeed

Next I ran PageSpeed Insights and gave Claude the report. Mobile performance was 91. It built the stylesheet into each page, told the browser to fetch the main fonts and header image first, and gave phones a smaller header image (66KB down to 21KB). Mobile performance went to 96.

My Take

Most of these problems are invisible. The page looks fine. You only see them in a crawl report, a status code or a slow phone connection, which is why a checklist beats eyeballing.

AI cuts both ways. It can introduce inconsistencies quickly, but it can also audit a site against a checklist in minutes. You still need to know what to ask for, which is where the article ends up too.

Plan the migration. Problem 8 is the one that hurts if you skip it. When I moved my old blog posts across from Squarespace, every old address was given a redirect to its new home.

Static isn't for everyone. For a focused B2B site that changes occasionally, it is fast, cheap and low-maintenance, and with an editor like Keystatic, updates don't need a developer. Large publishing operations with complex workflows are a different story. More on that in how this site is built.

A Five-Step Check for Any Static Site

  1. Request a made-up address and confirm it returns a 404, not a 200.
  2. Pick one URL format (slash or no slash) and check internal links and canonicals all match it.
  3. Make sure the sitemap doesn't list any noindex pages.
  4. Run one page of each template through Google's Rich Results Test.
  5. Test the site on mobile in PageSpeed Insights.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on your own site, let's talk.

Source: SEO for Static Sites: 8 Problems to Watch For, Despina Gavoyannis, Ahrefs, 1 October 2026.

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