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Greetings to all readers! Today I want to share one interesting case from our practice, which clearly demonstrates how changing a content management system (CMS) can affect search engine optimization. I’ll say right away that often such projects can be very complex, but the result is sometimes unexpectedly positive. In this article, I will touch on the importance of website redesign and redesign, and also share a real-life example.
In practice, it often happens that updating a website is just a way to get a client to spend money. Sometimes talk about “selling design” and other myths can be misleading. It happens that after several unnecessary changes, the site still does not begin to produce results, and the client wonders if they are trying to sell him something unnecessary.
To be honest, we do not develop websites as a separate service, unless it is required for SEO promotion, for example, when the client does not have a website at all or the current website cannot be optimized.
One of our clients was from the medical field. We started working on SEO promotion, but were faced with the difficulty of agreeing on a list of key queries. Sometimes it can be difficult to explain to a client why not only direct queries like “specialist + city” are important, but also other types of queries. When a client insists on a narrow set of requests and does not want to consider others, this makes further work difficult.
This time the situation was even more complicated. The site was developed on a custom CMS. In fact, when you see such developments in a year, you are surprised at how outdated such solutions can be. The following problems were found on the site:
After we assessed the situation, the client contacted the developer. The answer was short: “I have completed my work completely, the site is written in pure PHP and I will not correct anything.” We offered an option - to remake the site from scratch.
After much deliberation, the client returned six months later. The reason for the return was the deterioration of the site’s position for many queries, which was quite predictable: search engines were updated, and competitors adapted. Our plan was to redesign the site while maintaining the design and launch SEO promotion based on the new structure.
During the work, we redesigned the site and implemented functionality on a more modern framework. However, there were some problems: it turned out that the current hosting did not support the required versions of MySQL and the necessary extensions, and there were also minor problems with icons and online payment functionality.
After much coordination, we handed over the project and began work on SEO promotion. The process slowed again as the client continued to find new reasons to delay work.
This story would not be special if we did not monitor positions on key queries for all our clients, including former ones. It is noteworthy that, despite the absence of content changes (except for some minor corrections and replacement of sliders on the main page), a simple replacement of the CMS led to a noticeable improvement in the site’s ranking. We have noticed a steady increase in search engine rankings, with many queries reaching the top 5 and top 3.
After several months of observations, the site stabilized, and some of the requests that were in the top 3 gradually dropped, which is quite natural, since they no longer worked with the site.
Replacing a website unnecessarily makes no sense and is often a waste of time and resources. The most important things are adaptability, loading speed and code cleanliness. Websites built on builders, self-written CMS and templates overloaded with free plugins can cause low rankings in search results.
If someone argues that only appearance is important, then the above example clearly demonstrates that even without drastic design changes, but with improved layout and performance of the site, you can achieve excellent results in SEO.
If you have questions or need advice, you can contact the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" for any question by email info@seo.computer.
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