Website design is quite crucial since the trends tend to change rapidly. Imagine you came across an old website that looks prehistoric now. What would you think? Would you even consider going back to that website? Probably not. Website redesign improve your conversion rate, user experience, and many other aspects of your website. However, it also usually puts your search engine rankings at risk.
Redesigning a website usually changes a lot of aspects of the website. For example, you can remove or add certain content, change the domain name, even add new features to your website. All these changes usually affect your SEO, and even a single one of these changes is bad for your website.
The good news is, you can minimize the harm a redesign does to your website. The most important thing is to have a plan when redesigning your website. For this reason, we should look into an SEO checklist !
Website Redesign Check List;
- Get to Know Your Current Site
- Save Your Well-Performing Content
- Set Yourself Goals
- Aim for Improving and Avoiding Disaster
- Optimize Your Already Existing Content
- Set up 301 Redirects to Keep It Organized
- Speed is Important
Let’s see this SEO checklist in detail and how you can use it to improve your website without hurting your SEO.
Get To Know Your Current Site
You must get to know your website before you set on redesigning it. The thing that will hurt your website’s keywords once you redesign it is the change. So it is wise to check your website’s performance. The essential keywords, bounce rate, how much time your visitors spend on your site, number of unique visitors, and sales numbers are all significant. These can show you how well your site is doing in SEO terms.
It is also important to check if your website is working well. You should check for your website’s health. This will show you which links are working, which links are spammy, and which ones can hurt your website.
Then you can get rid of the things that can hurt your SEO and keep the ones performing well. Information is the most important thing when you want to redesign your website. This information will reward you if you gather enough information, and hopefully, the redesign will not hurt your search engine rankings.
Save Your Well-Performing Content
We need to emphasize the importance of this. It is essential how you change your content, especially if they are well-performing. Check your content and decide which ones are performing better than the others. Checking how many visitors you get, reviewing the relevant keywords, and checking how well you do with these pages on search engine rankings are good ways to check which ones you should save.
If you save these pages and do as little change to them as possible, it will preserve your website. However, if you delete one of the pages, it might hurt your SEO a lot. Changing these pages might help, so it is good to minimize changes.
Set Yourself Goals
We talked about how you can save your SEO from your website’s redesign process. However, it is also important to remember you should always be improving yourself. It wouldn’t be a complete SEO checklist if we didn’t talk about your SEO goals. Setting yourself goals is a good start.
You probably know what you want to keep and what you want to remove from your website. Now it’s time to think about how you can improve your SEO. You can think about how many unique visitors you want if you want to increase your keyword rankings if you want organic traffic rather than paid traffic. It will help you plan more realistically for your website redesign. This will also help you keep what is important in your mind when you begin redesigning your website.
You should always think about what will benefit your website in terms of SEO. Fort his you need to know set yourself goals, see what you want to achieve. It might not look like it’s important at the beginning, yet when you consider your website’s future, it becomes a lot more critical.
Aim for Improving and Avoiding a Disaster
Although we emphasized the importance of preserving your current site’s SEO, improving your SEO is more important. Most of the search engines constantly change what is important when it comes to checking your website to rank them. It is usually a lot better to aim to improve rather than preserve your content.
We are not telling you to just remove everything from your site and start from scratch. However, aiming to improve your SEO will usually help you prevent a disaster as well.
Optimize Your Already Existing Content
It might seem like it is pointless at the start, but optimizing your current content will also help you improve and preserve your rankings when you are redesigning your website. When you decide to redesign your website, you will have a chance to look at your already existing content from a new angle. It can help you improve your SEO before you start redesigning.
There are a couple of tips and tricks that you can use when you are optimizing your current website’s SEO. For example, there should always be a couple of keywords that are relevant to your content and products. Using relevant keywords a couple of times in your pages will give you a boost since search engines will reward the pages that use relevant keywords.
Making sure your content is built around what your target audience is searching for instead of making assumptions is another thing you should always keep in mind. At the end of the day, it will be your website’s visitors that will determine how well your website is doing.
Although it will take time, updating your current site before the redesign will help you reach your SEO goals. We talked about it briefly before; you should constantly be improving your SEO instead of optimizing your SEO once and then completely leaving it.
Set Up 301 Redirects to Keep It Organized
It is expected to remove some pages; however, if any visitors or search engine crawlers are sent to the old pages, then this will affect how well your site is doing. To keep it organized, the only thing you can do is to set up 301 redirects to existing pages. Archiving pages is also an option. However, sometimes it is much better to redirect to a new page with similar keywords that are doing much better.
Redirects ensure anyone who stumbles upon the old pages that you wish to remove is redirected to your new, redesigned pages. Naturally, this makes redirecting one of the most important steps of redesigning your website. Also, creating a map when you set up redirects will keep it all organized and help you in case you forget something about your website’s map.
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You will also have to set up redirects in case your website URL structure changes. If you don’t set up redirects, your visitors and the search engine crawlers will only see a page that no longer exists.
Speed Is Important Too
Today’s internet is really fast. Most internet users expect a webpage to load in just a couple of seconds, if not less. A small change in your website’s loading speed might not change the user experience much. However, speed is really important for search engines, and search engines also use your speed to rank your website.
To improve your webpage’s speed, you can compress your files, add a content distribution network, work on your code and minify it. These will help your website by making it easier to load, thus making it all faster. Your speed will reward you with better rankings since the search engines value speed and use it as a ranking factor.
Now Let’s Build Your Redesigned Website
After you decide which pages you want to keep and which ones you are going to lose, it is time for building your website. Updating your website architecture is important because updating your website’s architecture will help the search engine crawlers to find your website more easily while also letting search engine crawlers understand the relationship between pages.
After all, there will be a lot of sections that link your visitors to another page. The main page for example, can lead to the page where you show your products or the “about us” page. These should all be organized and easy to find. There are a lot of bad examples of bad website architecture on the internet, and these websites never get good rankings.
Consider checking out our WordPress web design services if you need professional help with web design for your WordPress website!
Website Redesign SEO Checklist Conclusion
We tried to give our readers tips to preserve and even improve their SEO when redesigning their website. We talked about a broad range of topics. These topics include both the things people need to do before they start redesigning their website and during the redesign process.
SEO is important since search engine optimization is the most important thing to decide how well your website is doing. Because of that, we prepared an SEO checklist for our readers who wants to redesign their websites to update them.
Another thing to remember is, as we mentioned a couple of times during this article, it is good to remember to think about improving the SEO of your website instead of trying to avoid a disaster. If you follow these steps, we are sure you are not only going to avoid removing pages that bring healthy traffic but also be able to improve your SEO when you are redesigning your website.
6 Comments
This SEO checklist for website redesigns is super useful. I’m planning a redesign soon and was wondering, how can I ensure that my site’s SEO isn’t negatively affected during the transition?
I’m glad you found the checklist useful! To ensure your site’s SEO isn’t negatively affected during a redesign, start by conducting a thorough audit of your current site to understand what’s working well. Maintain the URL structure where possible, or use 301 redirects for any changed URLs. Also, make sure to update your sitemap and keep tracking your SEO metrics closely during and after the redesign.
Great article! It made me curious about the role of user experience in SEO for website redesign. How should I approach UX improvements with SEO in mind?
Thank you for your comment! When approaching UX improvements, focus on creating a design that is not only visually appealing but also easy to navigate. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and loading times are optimized. Improved user experience like clear navigation, fast-loading pages, and a responsive design can significantly benefit your SEO as they are factors that search engines consider when ranking websites.
Informative read on the SEO checklist for website redesign. Is there a specific strategy to maintain or improve link equity during a site redesign?
I appreciate your feedback! To maintain or improve link equity during a site redesign, it’s important to keep the same URL structure as much as possible. If URLs need to change, use 301 redirects to link the old URLs to the new ones, which helps in transferring link equity. Revisiting your internal linking strategy to ensure it’s optimized and efficient can also help in maintaining link equity. Remember to also check for any broken links during and after the redesign process.