Redesigning a website is an inevitable process as every website loses its reliability within two to three years. Hence, it becomes essential to keep the website up-to-date and relevant for the ever-changing digital world. Now you must be thinking about what causes a website to require a redesign. Well, there are multiple signs that indicate that your website needs an overall redesign including sluggish performance, lesser traffic, and relatively low conversions. Besides, when the user experience of the website falls off, that is exactly when you know that your website is ready to get started with the redesign process. Businesses of all sizes and scales prefer to invest in quality website design and development services to ensure the quality of results.
However, the bigger challenge is to maintain the ranking of the website during the web redesign process. This is important to ensure as it takes rigorous keyword research and strategically search engine optimization focussed content to rank your website on the search results’ first page. Moreover, you are neglecting to ensure the very first function and reducing the profit for the business if you are not retaining the SEO of the website. Hence, make sure to not lose the SEO value whenever you redesign your website, and to help you have a proper check, we have come up with a checklist to guide you in your redesign process without losing your ranking that you have already earned.
List All the Pages of the Existing Website
The first and foremost thing that you are required to do before getting started with the redesign process is that you need to download the URL structure of the existing site. This is because while you redesign your website, there are chances that it might affect the URL structure of your website. In this way, you are keeping the old website alive so that it can be compared with the website once it’s redesigned. Hence, you should use plugins to download the website structures as it provides the liberty for it to be updated in the future whenever it demands changes. This will not only help you retain all the information but also helps in keeping track of the duplication.
Implement Your Redesign on a Test Website
Now that you have an inventory handy, it is time to start redesigning a new version of your existing website. But the question for maintaining the SEO while redesigning your site still remains the same. Well, you can ensure that your website’s SEO is not affected if you make design changes to the test website. Implementing redesign on the staging environment is so crucial as it prevents the partially built version of the new website to be indexed and also avoids search engines to crawl. You can also prevent your web pages that are in progress to be shown to the users and search engines by simply disallowing for indexing.
Do Adequate 301 Redirects
Now comes the turn to do the 301 redirects between the old and the latest and updated URLs. This is to maintain the user experience and to ensure that the URLs of both websites, the older one and the one with the latest version work properly and the website doesn’t lose out on the hard-earned SEO ranking that had been gained from the previous URL. This is because when it is not correctly done, the search engines may find 404 web pages. So, with the help of 301 redirects, you can redirect the older URL to the new version of your website. In this way, you can ensure that your website will not be downgraded by Google and the previous SEO rankings are ensured.
Go Live and Conduct an Audit
Lastly, you should make sure that you launch your website when you are getting less traffic. So that even if you face any errors or if any link is broken, you will manage to fix it rather before that error becomes problematic for your business. Once the website is launched, you must take tests and ensure whether it’s functioning properly or not. You can ensure that by verifying if the new pages and internal links are well-functioning. Also, make sure that the 301 redirects are working as they should and also whether the custom code and database are working properly. You can also audit the new version by using tools like DeepCrawl.
Taking everything into consideration, you can redesign your website without affecting the SEO of your website. However, you must consider hiring a professional web design and development company like Auxesis Infotech to get the best results. Its team has great strength of web designers and developers that provide the clients with the best results. Along with that, it also has the right set of resources and a great variety of all sorts of web services that massively help throughout the course of the redesigning process of your website.
