Wondering how to redesign your website without losing SEO rankings? If you’re not careful, redesigning a website can damage your SEO rankings and reputation to a certain extent.
Whether you are changing the CMS or your design and code, redesigning a website can be a daunting process. You need to be very attentive while you redesign your website because if you will fail to do it correctly then you might ruin your SEO rankings. Redesigning does not necessarily mean that you do something drastic such as change the domain. Regular upgrading of website can be deemed as re-designing. Below mentioned are some important things to consider to be sure a redesign of your website does not kill your Google rank:
- Setup your new website to a temporary URL of work offline. If you are planning to work on your live website it can lead to many problems. So, copy your existing website to a temporary URL or off the server.
- When you are done with making changes to your website, the next thing you should do is test its broken links and other things like its responsiveness. Generally, broken links don’t make much impact on the website but it’s essential to remove them.
- It’s important for you to let Google and other search engines know about the changes you have made to your website. Otherwise, it can damage your rankings, lower the traffic and decrease the domain’s trust.
- If you do need to change any URLs of your website, send the old URL to your new URL using a 301 redirect. You can learn more about those here.
- After you have made the necessary changes to your website, shift to your new website all at once.
- Make sure that your new website is verified with Google and other webmaster tools.
- Resubmit the sitemaps to Google as it is a beneficiary step to allow people find you conveniently.
- Monitor your rankings on all the search engines. You can use a ranking tool or do it manually.
Though redesigning your website and keeping your rankings can be daunting, considering the mentioned items above can keep. Go ahead and re-design your website for all the right reasons without losing SEO rankings and traffic. After you are done redesigning your website, you will notice beneficiary changes in your new website like increased traffic and much more.
