Website redesigns may make or ruin SEO. Learn how to accomplish it without jeopardising organic traffic, rankings, and money.
SEO may be affected by website redesigns.
A single error might lower rankings or even money.
Here’s how to revamp a site without losing organic visitors, rankings, or money.
Why redesigns are risky.
Website changes are serious business.
Apart from SEO, people don’t necessarily like website redesigns.
SEO horror tales often include site redesigns, replatforms, and relaunches.
SEO staff and external SEO consultants (who frequently are recruited to remedy others’ blunders) often struggle with the aftermath.
The following causes most site redesign failures:
Non indexing the site.
Redirects are absent.
Content addition/removal.
On a separate server, rebuilt websites are tested with the new appearance and feel.
Add the noindex meta tag to the test server (or block it in robots.txt) to prevent Google duplicate content issues:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”/>
This instructs the search engine to disregard this site version.
Before relaunching the website, people commonly forget to delete the noindex command.
Someone may not notice for weeks, losing leads, sales, and cash.
Before going live, delete the noindex meta tag.
No redirection.
You must “tell” Google and visitors where to locate your new website when shifting it to a new domain or URL structure.
Redirection is overlooked unless the company has an in-house SEO.
Poor user experience and lost SEO possibilities might arise from search engine bots and people landing on error pages or being routed to the homepage.
Rankings, traffic, and conversions will suffer if you don’t shift resources.
Since inbound links to your content go nowhere, you may lose that Google ranking boost.
Error pages may degrade your site in Google’s eyes.
Except 429, all 4xx errors are handled the same. Googlebot tells the indexing pipeline the content doesn’t exist.
Fix it? Use 301.
Content deletion/addition
Web Designers use “lorem ipsum” placeholder text even when the website contains content.
When the revamped website goes online, they’ll realise that much of the material doesn’t function. The content may be erased instead of altering the design.
Business owners often erase outdated information simply because it’s “old” and they don’t want to update it.
Over time, your material may have garnered links. Link equity will be lost when material is destroyed.
In addition, Google evaluates websites as a whole, not simply by content or pages. If your site decreases suddenly, you may lose credibility.
Same goes for opposite. Without creating Google issues, you can’t increase from 100 to 100,000 pages overnight.
Don’t rapidly increase or decrease your page number.
Fix it? Transfer current material to the new website as linkable assets. Use canonical tags or one web URL per each component.
When to revamp your site?
Site relaunches have merit despite the dangers.
Acquisition
After your company or website is bought, you have many choices for handling the “old” website:
Some new owners let the site decay.
The new owner’s website is redirected by some.
Some add “by [new owner]” to the logo.
Redesigning and relaunching, sometimes under a new name, is common for professional website owners.
Changing business model
Startups routinely switch business models. The pivot may be so large that the old company model no longer applies.
Let’s imagine your business started as a tool and subsequently became a service agency. Your prior website structure may no longer make sense.
Feature creep and clutter
Feature creep and clutter may occur alone or together.
Items, choices, information, and links gather on older websites.
Organic components are hard to remove from an established design and system.
Even long-term users will experience cognitive overload.
Your site may need a revamp if:
Time increases bounce and leave rates.
Recurring visits decline as it becomes tougher to retain new users.
Expansion
To service new markets (i.e., additional nations), introduce new goods, or reach new audiences, you may require a redesign or design upgrade.
Such instances don’t necessarily need a redesign. It depends on how readily a website may expand.
So, you wish to offer a worldwide audience or various languages instead of only the U.S. or UK?
After selling shoes, do you wish to sell clothes or household goods?
Do you want to target mass consumers rather than enthusiasts?
These major modifications may necessitate a complete redesign or at least benefit from one instead of fitting the new aims within the constrained old design.
Abandoned technologies.
Your website uses Flash? That was never a smart idea, particularly since Adobe ceased and most browsers stopped supporting it.
Using outmoded technology like Java (not JavaScript) or frames is the same.
You must fix them if your site still depends on them. Then a complete redesign may be necessary.
Google Chrome and its descendants no longer support certain less evident old technologies in your website code.
SEO should be included early.
Designers initiate the design process, as the term implies. But SEO-compliant information architecture (IA) must be designed before design.
Redesigning without affecting SEO
Employ an SEO! Tell all participating teams. Here are some SEO-friendly website makeover recommendations.
Establish concrete objectives.
You need internal consensus on redesign aims to succeed.
There should be business objectives and SEO goals.
It’s not simply a facelift. It must be verified using non-vanity measures. Traffic and interaction alone aren’t enough.
How will redesign affect conversions, revenue, and ROI?
Before assessing your objectives, choose appropriate KPIs
For instance, instead of adding intrusive pop-ups and overlays to your heritage design, you might remodel with built-in signup forms to boost your newsletter following. Each subscription would be a conversion.
Separately build the new location.
Use a local server to develop and test. Three for large website redesigns:
Development server.
Server for testing.
Real-time server.
You should test your site redesign as a global website.
If the new site isn’t available yet, use the noindex tag.
You may be tempted to work on the live site and present the new theme for tiny WordPress-based sites.
Don’t trust ready-made themes or the design and development team with even basic SEO!
It may be alarming to see your metrics immediately after. Some themes and designers neglect SEO basics or arbitrarily rewrite them.
Designers and UX professionals may not have realised that your title tag structure and headlines disappeared suddenly.
Instead of H1, H2, etc., the headings will have a div, span, or p-tag.
Your title tag may display the brand first or, worse, merely lorem ipsum and be duplicated everywhere, generating duplicate material that Google will automatically demote or delete from the index.
Meta tags, schema code, nofollow/sponsored/UGC characteristics, image alt attributes, and minimised scripts may disappear. Make a list of essential SEO characteristics before starting.
Don’t mix coding with design.
You should segregate code, behaviour, and design. That’s not on your previous site yet? Introduce this distinction on the new site.
Be glad. You’ll likely make several adjustments before going live.
Editing HTML code to change design is difficult and error-prone. It’s also impracticable. Additionally, it may affect SEO.
Content should be stored in a database. For a tiny legacy website, use XML or text files like.txt,.csv, or.inc.
Whatever works for you. Don’t mix.
In many situations, legacy websites from the 1990s included all of these items in one file, making it very hard to alter without disrupting unrelated stuff.
Even current WordPress sites struggle with code, design, and content.
To get English terms like “comment,” “search,” and “next” on your translated website, certain themes need changes or UX text.
Never touch a running system, particularly URLs.
Search engine optimisation follows this philosophy. A little modification might ruin your SEO.
Is your domain ranking well? Should it be renamed from x to x-y? Domain name changes are risky.
Your new domain may or may not be accepted by Google.
The algorithm may presume your website is new and place you in the “sandbox” for new domains.
Experienced SEOs know how long it may take to launch a new domain, even if some believe there is no such filter. So you want to preserve your authority.
Please don’t register a new domain without content authorization or while the existing one is still accessible.
If not, it risks being seen as a different project.
Having two domains for the same project is another error. Competition is internal. One must be your “all-in”!
Don’t modify the URL. In most situations, the design may enhance without changing that.
Unless the IA changes considerably, you may simply add or remove folders and pages.
Because the new structure has to be different, do you have to change your URLs?
Then redirect the old URLs to the new ones by mapping every single or at least key page upfront or by modifying the URL structure very slightly and automatically redirecting every URL in the.htaccess file using the asterisk “*”:
Content design is also important.
When looking for a new WordPress theme, you’ll fall in love with the design, only to find that it looks terrible when your content is shown.
Use the old site’s content or generate fresh site material from the start. After that, design the content.
First, evaluate each page before pruning material. Maintain pages that rank and have backlinks.
Search, referral, and direct traffic pages should be retained for obvious reasons.
Despite the preceding requirements, some material is necessary to create a website. Therefore, don’t dismiss obscure stuff.
Index and crawl.
Why is the most crucial technical SEO section last?
Once your new site becomes live, you must examine whether the SEO recommended practises you considered before are making it into the Google index and whether you keep your ranks.
To identify barriers like noindex, check your analytics and Google Search Console data periodically.
Check your sitemaps and use Screaming Frog to test URLs on the live server.
Server logs may also be useful. Why? Pages that haven’t been indexed or are orphaned may not appear elsewhere.
Because the Analytics code isn’t on all sites, certain pages don’t get traffic.
