How To Redesign Your Website Without Affecting SEO

Set up a temporary website URL and back up your existing website

It is too risky to carry out significant redesigns on your current website. The risk to user experience and functionality during transition is too high. You may need a professional developer or hosting company help, but it will protect you from potential issues which will damage your brand if things aren't handled smoothly.

Think SEO - always

One of the biggest mistakes during a redesign is not identifying the strengths of your existing site’s valuable SEO content. URLs hold credibility and valuable SEO history can easily be lost even during the best content redesign. Step 7 can help with this.

Crawl your current site

It's essential to understand the URL structure of your existing website if you are to avoid impacting your ranking. Plugins are available to identify the URL structure. Tools such as Screaming Frog and SEMrush will enable you to extract metadata and structure so you know how to match pages and URL redirections to your new site.

Noindex your temporary website

To put it plainly, you don't want your temporary website to be indexed. A work in progress site will be automatically indexed as you add your new content, which will ultimately see it devalued when you go live. You want your new content to be recognised as original when it is launched. Google and other search engines will see no value in your new website if they see the content as duplicate. Noindexing your temporary site is a simple yet often forgotten step.

Create and optimise your new content

Familiarity is vital to customer loyalty. They will enjoy a new look, but keeping the same pathways to orders or information will ensure that they can still navigate your site. Whilst you can change the look and refresh the website's content from time to time, it isn't a good idea to dramatically change its navigational structure. Your crawl data will help you match the layout for your new design, and you should check the structure once you have finished ensuring your map structure is the same. The only time we would say the structure isn't important is if your reason for the change is your original site was awful and not working.

Optimising your content is also essential. To help with the on-page analysis, you can get optimisation help from this helpful SEO packages guide for beginners. Now is also an excellent time to check your sites loading times and optimisation for mobiles and other devices. With it a known fact that Google ranks higher pages that load in under 3 seconds and visitors are increasingly expecting faster than 2 seconds, you don't want to be the website that sees visitors give up through poor loading speeds.

Create page-by-page 301 redirections from old to new pages

To avoid losing all of the SEO work from your old site, you must use 301 redirects for every single old web page. Search engines will then see a page URL has changed and assist visitors in finding the right page. A redirect should be to the same content on your new website wherever possible. If not, point it to the most similar page within your new content. Ensure that your redirects do not all simply land on your new home page if you want to avoid frustrated visitors. Redirects also look after bookmarks and social media links, so they continue to work once your new website is live.

Test the new site

It is essential to thoroughly test the new site to ensure everything navigates as it should and that all links and backlinks are active. Check all things work, including shopping carts and baskets, before being tempted to go live. Providing an excellent page experience for users is vital. The new Core Web Vitals metrics will aid site owners to test effectiveness in areas such as visual stability, speed and responsiveness of their new content.

Make the switch

Now it's D Day. Once you are sure you have done all you can, go for it! We believe it is better wherever possible to take one giant leap, but this may not be possible for some large websites, so you may look at making incremental changes. This workflow from development to deployment article may help. Check everything is working in live and run a broken links check to be sure.

Check for verification and indexing

Login to your webmaster tools for Bing and Google and make sure your site is verified. You can speed up the verification process by requesting index. Also, check your robots file and resubmit your XML Sitemap for maximum SEO optimisation.

Monitor your rankings and performance

Now is the time to check on how it's going. Keep a close eye on the ranking of your keywords. If your redesign has helped, then great. If not, take a look at your old site performance and eye up the competition. Be bold and make reporting bugs easy for users, perhaps as part of your contact form.

Many SEO tools can assist you in getting the best from your content; it just takes a little time. If you don't have the time or knowledge, you may benefit from an expert's help to check your website design and content for keyword and phrase optimisation. But don’t forgo an update to your website for fear of SEO damage. Done right, you can improve your users’ experience on your site without damaging your SEO.