Follow the Five Steps to Redesign Your Website Without Losing SEO Ranking
Updated at: March 26, 2024
Prioritizing website redesign SEO is undoubtedly one of the most important things to pay attention to when it comes to strategists, digital marketers, and SEO professionals. However, several graphic designers, account managers, and developers fail to understand the relationship between website redesigns and SEO. With such growing importance of website development, one needs to be well aware of how to redesign their website without losing SEO ranking. Whether site redesign SEO is something you need to discover, or you are well acquainted with the process, this five-stepped guide is bound to help you with your website development.
1. Take an Inventory of All the Existing Pages On Your Existing Website
Each page on your website turns out to be an asset when it is about SEO. If you are planning to redesign it for your desired and new web design company, you have to collect a list of your pages. That can, however, be performed in several ways, some of which are mentioned below:
● Use your sitemap
● Use a crawler
● Use Google Search Console
● Use Google’s index of your site
2. Try Implementing Your Redesign on a Test Site or Staging Environment and then Audit Your New Website
In order to maintain your SEO during a website redesign, you need to make your design changes to a staging site. This step assures that search engines don’t crawl and index an incomplete version of your website. Also, prevent search engines from indexing your test site by either of the following ways:
● For WordPress- Click on “Discourage search engines from indexing your site.”
● Explicitly add the “noindex” meta robots directive to each of your pages.
● Disallow all the robots from crawling your site via the robots.txt.file.
After reskinning your existing website, you need to go for its audit. Also, make sure you do a more extensive audit of the complete website if you have made significant changes to the existing website.
3. Set Up 301 Redirects
This allows you to forward an old URL to a new one of your preference. This ensures that search engines identify it as a permanent change. Setting up ideal redirects is crucial to your site redesign SEO.
4. Activate Your Redesigned Website and Verify Robots.txt and Meta Robots
Once you are done with your redesign and your website is ready for your users to see and use, you must activate it. This step needs the developers of any trusted website development company. However, please double-check that everything is going as planned.
Your robots.txt file can involve any explicit link to your sitemap of the redesigned website. Including your new sitemap in the robots.txt file will make crawling and indexing easier for the search engines. Also, ensure the fact that you don’t accidentally prevent essential pages from being indexed.
5. Set up Google Search Console and Also Monitor SEO Ranking Changes
You need to submit your sitemap URL to Search Console too. This assists Google in identifying and crawling all the indexable pages on your redesigned site quickly. After the work is done, you must continually monitor new coming data regarding conversions, rankings, and overall performance.
Conclusion
If you want to successfully establish your website design & development company, you have to be careful not to lose SEO ranking while you are redesigning. The steps mentioned above will undoubtedly help you navigate the redesign process without losing your hard-earned rankings amongst the major search engines.
