In a world where technology is trending drastically, just having a website is not sufficient. Your website needs to be in the loop with current design trends to remain relevant in the market today. It’s now common for businesses to redesign their website every couple of years or even more frequently. However, a website redesign is not only limited to how your website looks. A wrong and unplanned design can cause so many issues including a drop in your SEO rankings.
Here are some tips to avoid this ranking drop after a website redesign.
Website structure and navigation :
Your website structure is a very important aspect in terms of SEO and also in terms of website usability. Your website structure makes it easy to navigate through content for your visitors and for website crawlers to go through your pages for searching new content and indexing it, which helps in improving search engine ranking.
Often, in the website redesign process, the website structure is modified. It is important to check for changes and improve the website structure. Reduce the clicks to get to the most important content of your website (cornerstone content).
After the redesign, we should also check if heading tags, alt tags, and headings hierarchy are accurately maintained.
Redirects and URL structure:
In most of the redesign process, we have to delete old pages and create new ones. When the old page is replaced with a newer one, it should maintain the URL of the old page, or a proper redirection should be set up. Otherwise, it will cause a 404 not found error, and it might also hurt your existing ranking for the page.
A proper 301 redirect should be set up to avoid page not found errors.
Site Content:
It is a well-known fact that great content will boost your ranking and help you in getting organic traffic. If in your redesign process you have changed the content you should check if keyword density, keyword relevance, content length is properly maintained. Content changes should always be made with SEO in mind. It should be readable, clear, relevant, and add value to the topic.
Website Performance:
Website loading speed is a crucial factor for SEO ranking. If your site loads slow, it can frustrate your website visitors, and eventually, you will lose potential clients.
If your redesign process involves adding new features, adding new images and videos, you should check if that is making your site slower. If images are high quality they should be properly resized and compressed. To avoid a major impact on site performance, you can use several strategies during your development process.
Other things we suggest –
- Getting a reliable and fast web hosting
- If using any CMS, ensure the theme you are using is properly optimized and SEO friendly
- Do not use too many plugins or unnecessary scripts
- Check if your meta tags, title, and descriptions are properly moved to the new version
Traffic Loss After Migration?
Losing the traffic after redesign can be frustrating. Typically, a website will temporarily lose some of its visibility upon launch, as Google has to re-evaluate the site and decide what to do with the new changes. It is a minor drop that lasts only a couple of weeks.
If site structure and content copy remained the same, it won’t be a major concern. However, you have done major alterations and drastically changed the architecture, it should take long. You should use analytics software to track the performance and ranking changes of your site over time.
Need Website Redesign without ranking issues? We are here to help.
Over time we have helped many clients in revamping their site without any SEO ranking problem. We plan everything properly and our team ensures that the project is performed in such a manner, in which rankings are maintained. Over time our optimization methods can even help you in boosting your ranking. Get in touch today to discuss your project.
