Most companies will carry out a project of redesign website at any given time. And they should! In fact, 90% of people have abandoned a website because of poor design and almost half say that website design is the main factor in shaping their opinion of a company’s credibility.
While the redesigns of websites are essential to revamp your look, improve your legitimacy, and introduce new features essential to your site for user experience (UX), branding, search engine optimization (SEO), and other business considerations, they can also have a very serious (and often unexpected) side effect: destroying your SEO.
How does a website redesign impact your SEO?
It is not uncommon for websites to lose traffic and see drops in keyword rankings following a redesign of the website. But the redesigns are not always bad for the SEO. When done correctly, the redesign of your site does not mean that your SEO must take a hit.
It is useful to note that the small drops in traffic just after the redesign of a website are not excluded. But there is a very valid reason for these drops: search engines have to crawl your updated site before they can serve the new and improved version to their users.
In some cases, web traffic takes a sharp and permanent plunge after a redesign and the decreased traffic level and lowered rankings persist for weeks, usually this change is due to serious errors in SEO which were committed during the redesign.
Integrate your SEO strategy into the redesign process from the start
The best way to handle potential issues SEO in a project of redesign is to prevent them from existing in the first place. THE SEO for one redesign website design starts long before the first line of code is written.
Involve your SEO team from the first meeting
Their role in the project is to find solutions to infrastructure and content issues that may arise. Provide a list of requirements for SEO and expecting a designer or developer to take them into consideration is not enough.
SEO should be practiced throughout the process
Don’t wait for infrastructure decisions to be made for you. You may end up with a weird hosting plan, three subdomains, and two of them running on Wix. (We saw it happen.)
Here are some of the questions to consider when initiating a process of redesign :
- Is the new CMS SEO-friendly?
- Would you need to preset JavaScript?
- Does the new information architecture include your essential landing pages?
- How many URLs will change?
Conclusion
When the SEO is not integrated into the process of redesign, it can impact your search engine rankings. Yes, that’s right – a redesign of the website can lead to loss of traffic and get you removed from the first page of Google.
If you want to avoid this outcome, retaining your SEO and organic traffic should be a major consideration of any redesign of website. They should be calculated in your efforts to redesign, from planning to implementation, including post-launch checks.
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