Planning to redesign your website and give it a complete makeover? But redesigning
a website can be a tricky at times, especially where you run the risk of
dropping your site’s traffic. This could be a seriously challenging task that
most of the business firms faces when they go for redesigning their site to
give it a new touch.
Many questions arises in the mind of website owners when a new look is
to be given to the website like what will be the amount of my site’s traffic on
its re-launching? What will happen with the 404 errors? How the site will
perform in search engine results? What has to be done to the current links of
the absent pages?
There are two important ideas should be kept in mind of the Website
owners or designers about sprucing up their sites’ with new looks:
ü SEO
Should Be Considered Regularly While Redesign Process
At the time of website redesign process, it is necessary for the
developers, designers, and SEO experts to interact with each other regularly.
It helps the designers and developers to make the changes keeping the
perspective of SEO experts that helps in maintaining and improving site’s rank
after its revamp.
ü Don’t
Rush After The Immediate Launch Of The Redesigned Site
Most of times, even the world’s renowned websites and brands miss very
important SEO steps in the rush of meeting deadline. Maintaining site’s traffic
in accordance with the SEO guidelines is more important than meeting with the
deadline because unreasonable deadlines might affect the overall performance of
the site over the search engines.
Steps To Be Taken During Website Redesign
Process
The most common reasons of redesigning the site can be- the website
looks old enough which is not able to attract significant traffic or engagement
of users while revamping the website. It is advisable to incorporate few steps
to save your website from huge traffic loss upon it’s re-launch.
1. Don’t Pull Down Your Old Site
Don’t pull down your old site unless the new design for the site is
ready to go live. If the old site is pulled down this will impacts your current
site’s traffic significantly. As most of
visitors will stop visiting the site, if they encounter the website with a
message, “Website under Maintenance”.
So, if you want to continue the magic of traffic on your new site, it is
necessary to maintain your old site as long as the new site doesn’t go online.
2. Retain the Same URL Structure or Use 301
Redirect
If you can retain the same URL structure, the new site will be saved from
facing traffic loss. Because when you
change your website’s URL structure, you lose huge traffic through
inbound links. You will have to conduct an enormous 301 redirect mapping
campaign to get back your site’s traffic to its normal pace. So, if you are
planning to alter the URL structure of your website, then you must also execute
the 301 redirects to maintain your website’s traffic.
·
Benefits of using 301-redirect?
301- redirects the visitors from the old URL to the new URL. With 301-redirect,
the search engines will move the value of all set up inbound links from old
URLs to new URLs. For implementing the permanent change, search engines favor
the 301 redirect process for old URLs
3. Execute Inbound Link Analysis
Inbound links are considerable important for developing effective SEO strategy and if you are planning to change the URL of
your website during its redesign process, there is a huge risk of losing the site’s
effective inbound links. Hence, it is important that a detailed inbound link
analysis should be performed before proceeding with the website redesign
process. This will help in understanding the link profile. In order to do so,
you must know about the pages that link to your website and the source of those
links. You can perform the inbound link analysis with the help of various tools
available online like- Open Site Explorer that gives you a detailed analysis
report for your inbounds link.
4. Check out Your Website’s Reporting before
Redesign
Before revamping your website with new design and look, it is important
to check out the existing site report to know about its top performing pages,
top quality content and referring sites. This will help in knowing which of the
web pages are contributing most to the traffic, which is the top landing sites
and to which users are more engaged with. You could also know which of your
landing pages are getting referral traffic.
Analyzing site’s report will help in exporting them from the current
analytics package to the new site, so that the existing traffic can be retained
and maintained without facing any drop.
5. Create Webmaster Accounts
Popular search engines like Google and Bing offer webmasters tools,
which the webmasters can use for setting up their accounts and authenticating
the possession of a website, analyzing the diagnostics of their websites, checking
click-through data and search queries related to their sites. Having webmaster
accounts will help in receiving messages directly from the search engines, if anything
goes wrong with your website. If you are planning to move your site’s domain,
you can tell it to Google, using the Google Webmaster tool to reduce any affect
on the current traffic of your website.
By creating accounts on the webmaster tools of Google and Bing, you can
keep a check on site before redesign as well and after redesign to ensure
everything is moving smoothly.
6. Use of Vital Keyword & Phrases in
Website Redesign
It is important that vital keywords of your website should be determined
for their appropriate implementation during website redesign. Evaluate
the existing site’s content to know if the targeted keywords are used properly
in them and adding this content to the new site, in order to retain the site’s
traffic. When the website is re-launched with new design, start working on the
target keyword & phrases to get visitors attention towards your services
and products. The optimization of your website can be done after its re-launching,
by developing relevant tags using important keyword & phrases of your
website.
As you can perceive, there are various key topics to know while going
through CMS migration or website redesign process, however it is very adverse
that still most of the businesses are not aware of the after effects of website
redesign and as a result, they lose their complete SEO power, natural search
traffic, sales and search engine rankings. But if you choose to plan
accordingly before the start of the redesign process, you might not lose your
site’s SEO power. We at Digitronix Global help to serve you in this respect and
help boost your SEO and do not let it fall. Our team can help redesigning your
site in the most attractive way possible at affordable price.
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