Here’s How to redesign your website without hurting its search engine rankings!

Everything needs to get renovated over time. It can be your home, your wardrobe, or your website. You look out for your home and wardrobe, here we’ll talk about the website. With time, when competition is increasing, new players are entering the industry with all modern arms and ammunitions, don’t you think your older website requires a contemporary look and feel?

If you audit your website, you may find many bottlenecks that must get removed for the sake of website performance. Maybe the conversion graph is declining because the website UX is not serving well to the users. Or there are chances, that you’ve upgraded your marketing goals that need a website redesign.

But do you know that a redesigning a website is not everybody’s cup of tea? A little mistake and you may lose traffic and ranking in search engines. It needs proper vigilance and the right strategies, thereby, the SEO of the website won’t get hurt.

Let’s see how to redesign the website without damaging its SEO and ranking in search engines.

Some basic tactics to protect your website SEO and ranking while re-designing

Get your existing website metrics

Before you begin the website re-designing process; you must check the current ranking and traffic details of the website. Scrutinize your Google Analytics account and find out all the metrics. Furthermore, note down the keywords that are bringing traffic to the website. While you crawl the website, you unearth some critical components such as title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, etc. that you might need after re-designing the website. So, try not to change these elements taking into consideration of maintaining search engine optimization.

Website sitemaps and Google Search Console also have critical data metrics to give you. Once you are done with checking all the metrics, decide the goals to re-design the website.

Take the backup before you commence the website re-designing

It is an intelligent step to take back up of your existing website before you start the re-designing process. Have the backup of every critical facet like database, plugins, files, etc. because if anything will go sideways, then you’ll be able to revert to the previous website.

A staging environment must need during the process

When you begin the website re-design process, set up a staging environment where you can test your newly created pages before you launch them. This must be an essential step because eventually, you don’t wish to make changes on the live site and have something go wrong. Besides, website re-design in a staging environment helps in finding and fixing broken links, 404 errors, and other errors before launching the website. This practice will help you keep the SEO intact.

When in staging, to prevent the page visibility from users and search engines, put a “no index tag”, and click on “discourage search engines from indexing this site”, thus Google comes to know that there is duplicate content, and it doesn’t rank the pages. Or you can disallow all the robots from crawling your website via robots.txt file.

Keep new content and structure closer to the previous one

There might not be any visible issues on the site as of now, but can you guarantee, that no problems will arise in the future as well? Even if you cannot find any problem, there is no harm in keep reviewing the website and update or re-designing it as per modern demands. But try to keep the content and structure close to the previous website and update your development team about which all tags will remain the same after re-design. If you want to drive in more customers and make them focus on the key elements in your UX/UI website design, Improve your website design for a greater user experience.

Include proper 301 redirects

When you are creating new URLs while re-designing the website, it is important to ensure that there are 301 redirects in place for every new page. Don’t forget to inform Google about new content and re-designed site structure. And as mentioned above, don’t change much in your site structure. It improves your odds of preventing the website ranking in search engines.

Set up internal links for new content that you’ve created

After the re-designing, when you are ready to launch your website, make sure you have internal links set up to new content. Because it let Google knows that you have more valuable content for users. Such pages with links get priority on indexing, and it improves website’s overall search engine ranking.

Review the schema markup

Schema markup is the semantic vocabulary which is added to the HTML code of the website that helps search engines to understand the content in a better way, which eventually impacts the website rankings. While you re-design the website, don’t forget to review schema markups, especially if you’ve manually edited the website codes to re-design the elements and the new elements need to markup with relevant tags as well.

There is a structured data testing tool to check the schema markups. To check them, just paste the schema code in the code snippet tab and you’ll be able to check all the new and old schemas. And if the website is huge, check all the URLs and wait for some time after launching the website. Your Google Search Console will give you the schema report to know the exact status of all implemented schema markups.

Audit the new website thoroughly

If you’ve done only reskinning of existing pages, then nothing much have changed on the website. But if the redesigning includes extensive changes, you must perform complete SEO audit to track the website performance and traffic. Moreover, tracking the website traffic and rankings after you re-design the website will help you know the mistakes you’ve made.

Verify Robots.txt and Meta robots

Don’t forget to include the new sitemap of the website in the robots.txt file to make crawling and indexing easier for search engines. Furthermore, check if you’ve blocked any important pages from being indexed.

Reach out to a digital marketing agency if needed

Despite following all the tactics, there are chances that you make mistakes that will lead to severe SEO issues. So, better to reach out to some digital marketing agencies. They will redesign your website without harming its SEO. They have specially trained professionals for this work, and it also lets you focus on other important facets of the business.

Wrapping up

Website redesign service is necessary. You can avoid it for some time but eventually it is needed for the sake of the performance and security of the website. The reason you avoid this important task is the SEO of the website. Because we all know how crucial it is to maintain the SEO and ranking of the website.

Here is the good news, you can re-design your website anytime you wish to, and that too without hurting its SEO. Above are the strategies that will help you out and as mentioned above the best option is to hire an agency for this critical task.

No website can stand without a strong backbone which is its SEO. Thus, maintaining the SEO is anyways important and somehow website redesign is protecting its SEO for the future.

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