Websites are the very core of modern businesses these days. Companies tend to invest heavily to redesign a website, in order to make them more appealing to customers, as well as ensure that website functionality can meet consumer expectations.
n most cases, a lot of businesses also engage in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activities so that they can ensure visibility, awareness, and credibility for their website, among other things. However, every once in a while, your website needs to be redesigned.
There are various reasons why this needs to happen, and some of them are maintaining a modern look, rebranding strategy, switching platforms, adding new features and so on and so forth.
Now, if you’ve already invested in SEO and managed to ensure good ranking, wouldn’t website redesign ruin those rankings? Not necessarily, because the entire redesign process can be accomplished seamlessly without hurting your rankings along the way.
With that in mind, here are a few ways to redesign your website without losing search rank.
Conduct website audit
Before you proceed with redesigning your website, you’ll have to analyze it thoroughly. This analysis includes determining your current search rank, your website architecture alongside the URL structure, title tags and meta descriptions for all of your pages.
The main reason this is important is that by analyzing your website, you’ll be able to determine on which aspects to focus during the redesign so that you don’t lose your search rankings in the process.
A good example is robots.txt files. These text files tell search engine crawlers how to crawl or index your website pages. In other words, they tell them whether or not to index some pages or specific content. Therefore, if you have any blocked content on your current pages, they need to remain so even after the redesign.
Pick the right hosting provider
Picking the right hosting provider for your redesigned website is very important. In most cases, web owners migrate to other domains and other providers when redesigning their websites.
There are various reasons for such a decision, including finding a better deal, more features, better service and so on. What’s more, you may switch hosting providers in order to improve search rankings.
For instance, website speed plays a vital role in search rankings. If your current provider cannot guarantee good speed for your website, it’s time to switch to a provider who can. In addition, redesigning a website is also about adding or removing content.
In order to maintain search rankings throughout the redesigning process, you must be able to do this seamlessly. You can consider cPanel hosting in Australia, for instance, if you wish to have more control over your website’s looks and content on your pages.
Inform everyone about the redesign
Redesigning your website is bound to cause at least a bit of downtime. If you don’t inform your customers, it may negatively impact your search rankings.
Therefore, inform everyone through various media channels, such as your website, blog, email, social media platforms and so on. That way, high bounce rate and customer dissatisfaction due to downtime won’t have a negative impact on your rankings.
In addition, you must also inform the search engines, such as Google. The key here is to preserve most of your old website’s architecture so that Google can maintain your search rankings. In addition, you must ensure that your new website is verified in the Google Search Console so that you can maintain your rankings.
Set up 301 redirects
301 redirects are essential for setting up new URLs while still having old ones. This HTML status code informs page visitors that the page they’re visiting has moved to a new location or address.
A good example is implementing a TSL (Transport Layer Security certificate for your HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) which will make it an HTTPS during the redesign.
Therefore, your old URL would be www.yourwebsite.com compared to a new URL, https://www.mywebsite.com. When website visitors land on an old URL, you can redirect them to a new page without losing search rankings in the process.
Changes in the URL structure are quite common in a website redesign. Oftentimes they are intentional, but they may also be a result of a simple design mistake.
Website redesigning is welcomed and oftentimes necessary. Everything in the online world eventually has to change and evolve for the better, including websites. When redesigning your website, it’s important to implement the right strategy, in order to maintain the search rankings you managed to reach with your old website.