Prioritization of website redesign When it comes to strategists, digital marketers, and SEO professionals, SEO is without a doubt one of the most important aspects to consider. However, many graphic designers, account managers, and developers are unaware of the connection between website redesigns and SEO. With the growing importance of website development, it is critical to understand how to redesign a website without losing SEO ranking. Whether you are new to site redesign SEO or are already familiar with the process, this five-step guide will undoubtedly assist you with your website development.
1. Make A List Of All The Pages On Your Existing Website.
When it comes to SEO, each page on your website becomes a valuable asset. If you intend to redesign it for your preferred and new web design company, you must first compile a list of your pages. This can, however, be accomplished in a variety of ways, some of which are listed below:
Make use of your sitemap.
Make use of a crawler.
Make use of Google Search Console.
Utilize Google's index of your website.
2. Test Your Redesign On A Test Site Or Staging Environment Before Auditing Your New Website.
You must make design changes to a staging site in order to maintain your SEO during a website redesign. This step ensures that search engines do not crawl and index a partially completed version of your website. Prevent search engines from indexing your test site by doing one of the following:
For WordPress, select "Prevent search engines from indexing your site."
Add the "no index" meta robots directive explicitly to each of your pages.
Using the robots.txt file, you can prevent all robots from crawling your site.
After reskinning your existing website, you should have it audited. Also, if you have made significant changes to the existing website, conduct a more thorough audit of the entire site.
3. Configure 301 Redirects
This allows you to redirect an old URL to a new one of your choice. This ensures that search engines recognize the change as permanent. Setting up appropriate redirects is critical for your site redesign SEO.
4. Launch Your New Website And Check Robots.Txt And Meta Robots
You must activate your website once you have completed your redesign and it is ready for your users to see and use. This step necessitates the involvement of developers from a reputable website development firm. Please, however, double-check that everything is proceeding as planned.
Any explicit link to your redesigned website's sitemap can be included in your robots.txt file. Incorporating your new sitemap into the robots.txt file will facilitate crawling and indexing for search engines. Also, make certain that you don't accidentally prevent important pages from being indexed.
5. Install Google Search Console And Track SEO Ranking Changes
You must also submit the URL of your sitemap to Search Console. This helps Google quickly identify and crawl all indexable pages on your redesigned site. After the work is completed, you must constantly monitor new data pertaining to conversions, rankings, and overall performance.
Conclusion
If you want to build a successful online marketing agency, you must be careful not to lose SEO ranking while redesigning. The steps outlined above will undoubtedly assist you in navigating the redesign process without losing your hard-earned rankings with the major search engines.