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SEO Audit Template for Single‑Page Micro‑Apps: Quick Wins to Increase Traffic

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2026-02-11

5 min read

Quick wins for a single‑file app: stop losing traffic to avoidable technical issues

If you ship a one‑page micro‑app or a small landing page, you don’t have the luxury of volume to hide slow load times, broken indexing, or missing metadata. A single 250KB HTML file that doesn’t load in 2.5 seconds or exposes mixed content can lose a session and a lead—permanently. This audit template targets that reality: the smallest fixes that produce measurable traffic growth for single‑page sites and single‑file apps.

Deliverable overview: what you’ll get

This article includes a focused, prioritized SEO audit checklist and a compact report template tailored to single‑page micro‑apps. Use the checklist for fast triage and the report template to communicate fixes, effort, and expected impact to stakeholders and engineers.

How this helps (inverted pyramid)

Immediate wins: 10–20 minute checks that reduce friction and improve Core Web Vitals.
High‑impact fixes: prioritized technical tasks that increase indexability and clickability.
Operational template: copy‑and‑paste report and checklist you can share with product and DevOps.

2026 context — why single‑file SEO is different now

In late 2025 and early 2026 search engines continued to tighten expectations around page experience, AI‑authored content signals, and edge delivery. Two important trends shape this audit:

Core Web Vitals maturity: INP (Interaction to Next Paint) fully replaced FID as the interaction metric, and thresholds continue to be strict: aim for INP < 200ms, LCP < 2.5s, CLS < 0.1.
Edge & HTTP/3 and QUIC adoption: HTTP/3 and QUIC saw wide adoption across major CDNs in 2025 — using an HTTP/3‑capable CDN materially reduces tail latency for international users.

First 5 minutes: triage checklist (do these now)

Open the page in Chrome, run Lighthouse quick audit — confirm LCP, INP, CLS scores.
curl -I https://yourpage.example to check HTTP status and TLS: ensure 200, HTTPS and no redirect loops.
Check robots.txt and meta robots for accidental noindex / nofollow tags.
Inspect canonical tag — for single pages use an absolute canonical that matches the published URL.
Verify page size & asset count: total payload > 500KB? Flag for optimization.

Priority audit sections

1) Performance (High impact)

Performance is the strongest lever for single‑page sites. A tiny improvement in LCP or INP can increase engagement and rankings.

Size budget: set a strict size budget (example: 200–300KB gzipped for landing pages). If your single file is a bundle, split assets or host large assets on CDN (images, fonts, video).
Image and media strategy: convert to AVIF/WebP, serve responsive images, or offload to a CDN. For single files, embedding images as data URIs inflates HTML—prefer external URLs with long cache TTLs.
Fonts: use font-display: swap, subset fonts, self‑host fonts on CDN, and preload the most important ones.
Critical rendering path: inline minimal critical CSS if needed, defer non‑essential styles and scripts. For micro‑apps, reduce JS to what's necessary for first interaction.
HTTP/3 + compression: ensure your CDN supports HTTP/3 and Brotli or Zstd compression for text assets. These deliver lower latency and smaller payloads.
Service worker caching: add a simple service worker for cache first responses or stale‑while‑revalidate. For single files, this dramatically improves repeat view performance and can mitigate short CDN outages.

2) Security & CDN best practices (High impact)

Security and CDN configuration influence indexability, user trust, and page speed.

HTTPS everywhere: TLS 1.3 with automated certificates (Let’s Encrypt or managed by your CDN). Enforce HSTS with at least a 6‑month max‑age for live sites. See security best practices for TLS recommendations.
TLS checks: test OCSP stapling, cert chain validity and ensure no mixed content. Use openssl s_client or online TLS checks.
Cache control: use immutable caching for hashed filenames and reasonable TTLs for static assets. For single‑file apps, treat the HTML as short‑lived but assets as long‑lived with versioned URLs.
Edge features: enable HTTP/3, origin shield, and image optimization at CDN edge. Use edge redirects for country/language variations to avoid client‑side redirects.
Security headers: deploy Content‑Security‑Policy, Referrer‑Policy, X‑Frame‑Options, and Subresource Integrity (SRI) on third‑party scripts. For hosted single files, some hosts let you set headers via dashboard or meta tags (prefer server headers when possible).

3) Technical SEO & Indexing (High to Medium impact)

Canonicalization: single canonical per page, and canonical should match the preferred domain (www vs non‑www, https). Consider domain portability and canonical strategies when publishing micro‑apps across domains.
Indexing checks: use the URL Inspection API (or Search Console) to ensure the page is indexed; check cached copy to confirm Google sees the page content.
Sitemaps: include the page in your sitemap.xml with a valid lastmod and priority. Even a site with 1–10 pages benefits from a tidy sitemap.
Structured data: add schema.org WebPage, BreadcrumbList (if relevant), and SoftwareApplication or Product schema where applicable. Validate with the Rich Results test.
Meta & open graph: include descriptive title (55–60 chars), clear meta description (120–155 chars), and Open Graph/Twitter card markup for social click-through improvements.

4) Content quality & on‑page fixes (Medium impact)

Single pages must communicate value quickly. Focus on entity clarity and topical depth — even short pages can be optimized for E‑E‑A‑T.

Headline and H tags: make one H1 that maps to the primary keyword intent; use H2/H3 to structure key points.
Unique value prop: first 300 characters should answer

Tools & Templates

Use small, focused tooling: local HTTP servers for testing, Lighthouse CI for automated checks, and a simple incident playbook to triage CDN or certificate issues. If you build micro‑apps on a CMS, see Micro‑Apps on WordPress for patterns and plugin recommendations.

Wrap up

A single page can outperform a large site if you obsess over payload, caching, TLS, and clear metadata. Use this checklist to triage fast, prioritize fixes, and communicate risk to stakeholders.

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