Your website is the first impression that you ought to create in front of your audience. However, when you design your website, it isn’t that you have had it developed once and it can’t be changed in the future. In fact, there are various reasons you could be required for website redesign such as:
- Evolving business nature
- New technological additions
- Scaling up the functions and features
- Business re-branding
- Adopting a new content marketing strategy
- Changing the platform
- And many more
When such time comes you should be strategic and clear in your approach and must follow a good ecommerce website design guide to proceed step-by-step.
SEO-Friendly Website Re-Design: Maintain Rankings and Audience
When re-designing your website, you have to ensure that you don’t impact the search ranking score negatively, and you would also not want to lose out on your built audience. And one thing that you should know is that re-designing your website can be done effectively without losing any SEO.
So, what steps to take when re-designing the website? Read on to know:
Create the Backup
The first and foremost thing to do is take an inventory of your website pages. That means every page on your website has to be collected. Along with that, make sure to list down what number of pages are there on the site, what number of links are present, number of content levels and every other detail, so that you can cross-check them later on after the re-design process. You can use different tools for this purpose, including Google Search Console, website’s sitemap, and a crawler.
First Check with a Test Site
After you start re-designing a new version of the website, the ideal way to go is by using a test site. It is a kind of development site or also termed as staging site. This test site helps to give you a complete vision of how your new website will look. And another main reason to use such a test site is that you are avoiding the search crawlers to find and index incomplete website version. And for user point of view, you don’t want a website in the middle stages to be seen by users as it creates a bad impression overall.
Create the Redirection (301)
You have to ensure that when people visit your old website URL, they are conveniently directed to the new URL. And for this 301 re-direction implementation is a crucial step. Redirecting old pages to the new ones is important to keep the SEO element maintained. This re-direction helps to tell search engines that the re-direction is a permanent one, thereby enabling the crawlers to move to the new pages.
Carry out SEO Audit of the New Version Site
SEO audit is needful to know whether SEO factor has been impacted or not. When you are changing the look of your website or adding new features, it means that some SEO issues may occur. Auditing of the website helps to find these out, map them and resolve at the earliest.
Actuate the New Site
Once the redesign process is complete and you are ready with all the content updated and done, you should launch the new website for the users. When you hire a web designer for this re-design purpose; how they have created the website and whether it is functioning well or not, this is the time to see the actual result. Be specific about each and every aspect like collecting data including heat-mapping, Google analytics, social media pixels, as well as the tracking codes of the website. Ensure to double-check the website just before you launch it.
Check for the Robots.txt Files
These are files that help the webpages to be crawled and indexed by the search engine crawlers. Therefore you need to verify that you have set-up a new sitemap in the robots.txt file, avoiding any indexing issue later on.
Submit the Site to the Search Console
To get searched and to appear in SERPs, the next step is to submit your sitemap URL and XML sitemap to the Search Console. This is a must-do step and a needful one for website’s visibility and ranking.
Conclusion:
After you are done with your website re-design and all the other steps as mentioned above, ensure that check your website for SEO performance changes time and again. This has to be done especially in the initial days after launching or activating your website. Monitor all the information related to webpage rankings, inbound traffic, conversions and site performance.
Site re-design isn’t a hard task and most of the website owners go through this time and again. Ensure that have a reliable and professional website design company in India, or anywhere else, who can help you out with this effectively and accurately, keeping your SEO elements in place.
