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Website redesign is an inevitable part of its life cycle. However, it is important to understand that when updating the appearance of a site, you can accidentally worsen its search rankings and lose traffic. Small changes, such as changing the background or color of buttons, do not have a significant impact on SEO. But if updates affect the site structure or technical elements, without the proper approach, you can seriously affect your rankings in search engines.
Let's look at what you should pay attention to when preparing a website for redesign.
The first step should be to check the status of the current site using a technical audit. This will help identify weaknesses and provide accurate data for further work. Evaluate the following parameters:
This analysis solves two important problems:
During a large-scale redesign, the structure of the site usually changes, which can lead to the loss of current positions in search engines. To avoid this, you need to prepare a redirect map in advance. It is important that search engines continue to index old pages without considering them orphaned. To do this, you should create a table where the old URLs will be in one column, and their new analogues in the other. After the redesign is complete, you need to install 301 redirects for all changed pages.
Updating the URL structure on a new site is a good opportunity for URL optimization. Correct and short URLs not only make it easier for users to understand, but also help search bots in their work. If page addresses were not optimized before, it is worth fixing this at the redesign stage.
Here are some recommendations:
Metadata such as description and title play an important role in SEO. You should save this data before redesigning. The page description can be restored even if it is lost, since search engines themselves can create the description using suitable content. However, with title it is more difficult - the loss of titles can negatively affect search rankings. Therefore, it is important to keep the old title tags or introduce new ones immediately after the redesign.
Optimized content is one of the most important factors in SEO. If you have articles that are indexed well, it is important to save them after the redesign. Make sure they remain accessible to search engines and are located on the same pages. If the new site structure does not provide space for old content, it is worth considering how to maintain its visibility for search engines.
It is important that all keywords and important elements remain within the visibility range of Google and Yandex robots. If your site uses hidden text that is not indexed, it is best to avoid this practice during your redesign. Try to ensure that all texts on the site pages are fully displayed.
Linking is important for all sites, especially large ones. When updating the design, you should carefully ensure that all useful links remain working. Often, new blocks on a site may contain links to non-indexed pages, which will lead to a drop in rankings. Unnecessary links also waste search engines' crawling budget, which can affect the indexing of relevant pages.
When planning changes to linking, make sure that all important pages remain accessible for indexing, and unnecessary blocks are closed from search engines.
If your site does not yet operate using the secure HTTPS protocol, then this is the ideal time to switch to it during the redesign. HTTPS ensures secure data transmission and increases the trust of users and search engines. This is especially important for sites that collect personal data or accept payments.
Before launching a new design on the main domain, you should check the test version of the site. It should be closed from indexing so that search engines do not index it before the official launch. At this stage, it is important to conduct a technical audit of the updated resource to make sure that all data has been transferred correctly.
To compare the current and new version of the site, you can use special tools such as Frog SEO Spider or Xenu. They will help identify major errors, as well as minor shortcomings. The main focus should be on checking the URL and metadata.
Major errors that may occur after a redesign include:
Website redesign is an important stage that requires care and careful preparation. If the changes do not take into account SEO aspects, it can lead to significant losses in traffic and search engine rankings. If you are not confident in your abilities, turn to professionals. Mistakes in a redesign can be costly and have long-term consequences.
You can contact SEO studio specialists "SEO COMPUTER" with any questions by email info@seo.computer.
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