A lot of our clients have undergone site redesigns this year in some way, shape, or form.
Some just reworked their content while others completed changed the entire design, URL structure, content and messaging and more.
While websites need to be redesigned every few years in order to feel fresh and up-to-date, site redesigns can also deliver a strong blow to your SEO campaign if you’re not careful.
These are the steps to follow to ensure that your SEO will not be affected by a website redesign
When doing a site redesign there are several things to check to make sure that your rankings and SEO performance will not be negatively affected. Failing to follow all the steps correctly will confuse search engines and this will damage your website’s trust.
There are many reasons why a website redesign is necessary. The most common reasons are:
- You want to change the website design
- You want to do rebranding
- You want to switch to a mobile-friendly theme
In this article we are assuming that you will be keeping the same domain for your website.
1. Setup the New Website on A Temporary URL
It’s always a good practice to build your new website on a temporary URL, work on the new design and when it’s ready you can copy the temporary website to the new domain.
Working directly on your live website is not recommended because a lot of things can go wrong on a publicly visible site which will give a very bad impression of your business.
Also, for SEO purposes, you will need to make sure that your testing website is not indexed by Google to avoid any duplicate content issues.
2. Make Sure Your Homepage Is Just .Com
When you have multiple versions of your homepage, which for some reasons happens in various CMS platforms during a site redesign, you run the risk of encountering a duplicate content issue.
In addition to duplicate content, you are also splitting the link value of your homepage across multiple URLs, which can limit the long term SEO success of your website.
Most outside links are going to point to .com, but if the majority of your internal links point to .com/home so you are splitting the SEO value of your homepage. Most of the times this isn’t done on purpose and a simple 301 redirect will resolve the issue.
3. Make a Conversion Based Page Design
A good website has many characteristics but above all, it respects the user by providing them with a friendly interface. The website should be designed to convert your visitors into leads, sales, sign-ups, etc.
4. Revisit Your Keyword Research As Needed.
If you are rewriting the content on your site sometimes you’ll have to tweak the keywords you’ve been using as they may no longer make the most sense or be the best fit
It’s best to write the new content first and then do your keyword research so you aren’t trying to force the content to fit with pre-determined keywords that may or may not be the best choices.
But understand that when you change content drastically you change what search terms that page will get pulled into the SERPs for. Old, high-performing keywords might start to slip after a site redesign because the content on your website no longer supports them.
5. Create a list of all pages from your OLD website
It is normal to change the URL structure or slug of a page, but it is also of great importance that you let Google and other search engines know about the changes.
Failure to do so will damage your rankings, decrease your domain trust and as a result, you will lose your organic traffic.
This is one the very first things you should do when undergoing a site redesign, especially if you are making radical pages.
Pull every URL that is on your old site and page by page list what the old URL is and what the new URL will be.
6. Create New Pages for Each of Your Old Pages
In most cases changing the website theme or URLs will not have a negative impact. What is more likely to cause problems with rankings is a chance in the web page content.
Dramatically changing the content is not recommended unless you are doing it for pages that don’t have a good ranking and you want to improve them.
To avoid such unpleasant situations when doing a redesign, try to change only items that are related to the design and look and feel of the website and don’t do any changes to the text content.
7. Create Page-By-Page 301 Redirections to Redirect Old URLs to New URLs
We have seen so many sites ruin their SEO campaign because they didn’t use a 301 redirect properly to transfer external links and SEO value from old URLs to new, creating dozens of 404 errors.
The new URLs are starting from square one and have to earn their place in the SERPs. A 301 redirect lets them piggyback on the SEO value of the old URL.
Another reason why you might want to do a 301 redirection, is to ensure that any bookmarks or social media links will still be working when the new website goes live.
8. Switch to the new website
What you should do at this stage is make the switch to the new website all at once.
The alternative way would be to do it in stages, especially when it comes to big websites but Google’s recommendation is to do it all at once since this way will expedite crawling.
9. Use your Google Webmaster Tools Account
Use your Google Webmaster Tools Account to crawl and fetch your website as Google, submit new sitemaps so all the new URLs are properly indexed, check from 404 errors and other crawl issues, watch for messages from Google about the health of your website and more.
When you make a lot of changes to your site there are a lot of little details that can go wrong, and you want to make sure you catch them before they become an issue.
