website redesign steps
Step 1: Audit Your Current Website
This first step on your website redesign SEO checklist will help you
gain a bird’s eye view of:
what needs to be improved/fixed about your existing website
what are the high ranking areas that you shouldn’t touch
Use Screaming Frog data to inspect your website and put together
an inventory of all the:
duplicate page titles
missing, multiple, or duplicate H1 tags
missing Image ALT texts
broken internal/external links
missing or duplicate meta descriptions
page titles over 512 pixels
meta descriptions over 923 pixels
Furthermore, manually scan key elements like:
sitemap
URL structure
page loading speed (use Google’s PageSpeed Tools)
duplicate content
Google-indexed pages
robots.txt
Tip: download and back up the URL structure of your “old”
website; you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO to download the
updated sitemap of your website.
Step 2: Make Sure Your Test Website Is Not
Being Indexed
For you don’t want the risk of Google indexing your test website to
add to the pile of… other things that could go wrong during the
redesign process.
How do you prevent your test site from being indexed?
you either block it in the robots.txt file
or you click the noindex box in your CMS
Step 3: Match Up The Old and the New Pages
to Keep Your SEO When Redesigning a
Website
“How do I preserve rankings and traffic during a website
redesign and rebuild?”
By making sure that the data on your current website — meta
descriptions, word counts, canonical tags, etc. — remain as such
on the new site, as well.
For this, crawl your test website and put it against the “old”
website to identify all the “missing parts” and the areas that need
improvement.
This is a foolproof method to ensure that the updates that you’re
about to make are truly needed.
Step 4: Check Your New Website for Broken
Links
Another critical step to put on your website redesign SEO checklist
is crawling your new website for broken links.
Use Google Webmaster Tools for this.
Step 5: Address The 404 Error Pages
One of the major website redesign considerations to keep in mind
is that you’ll need to handle the 404 issues popping up on your
new website.
There are 2 ways that you can address a 404 URL:
redirect the old URL to the new URL of your test server
set up this URL on your test server
Step 6: See that Your Live URLs Are
Optimized, As Well
A foolproof method for keeping your SEO when redesigning a
website is to make sure that those live URLs, that aren’t yet on
your current website (the most recently added ones) are properly
optimized.
Just use the following on-page optimization checklist, which
includes all the key areas where you should add your focus
keywords (or semantic keywords):
page title tag
H1 tag
page URL
H2, H3, H4 tags
meta description
body content
image ALT tag
Step 7: Keep the URL Architecture Identical
Since the SEO impact of changing URL is huge.
Do you remember that you’ve downloaded the URL structure
while auditing the old website (see Step 1)?
Make sure to back it up and stick to it after the redesign process,
as well.
Step 8: If Some of Them Do Change, Set Up
301 Redirects
If the unwanted scenario does happen and some of your URLs do
change, keep in mind to map out 301s to their corresponding new
URLs.
That, if you do want to preserve your rankings and traffic, of
course…
How?
by manually updating your .htaccess file:
Redirect301/old/oldsite.html http://www.yoursite.com/newur
l.html
by using a redirect plugin: the process is no more complicated
than filling in a form
Step 9: Leave the Content Unchanged on Your
High Ranking Pages
One of the things to watch out for in order to keep your SEO when
redesigning a website is the “temptation” of changing content on
your high ranking pages.
Tip! A safe way to redesign your website without losing SEO is to
make changes to the pages’ design elements only. Once you’ve
launched the new website, monitor your rankings for a while and,
unless you notice some alarming drops, go ahead and apply
(some) changes to the written content, as well (if absolutely
necessary).
Step 10: Check Your Robots.txt File
Make sure that your robots.txt file didn’t get corrupted during the
website redesign and rebuild process.
Just click on the “robots.txt” option under the crawl section.
Step 11: Resubmit Your Sitemap to Google
A key step to take for avoiding new website Google ranking issues.
Submit your new website’s XML to Google (and Bing) so that its
new structure gets crawled and indexed in due time.
Step 12: Check and Monitor Your Ranking
Position
So, you’ve finally launched the improved version of your old
website. Your team’s hard work over the last few months is now
live.
Still, you’d better remain vigilant and monitor your new website
for 2–3 more months.
During this time:
keep track of how your top keywords are ranking
make sure Google’s not indexing the wrong pages for those
keywords
be ready to detect any sudden drop or… boost in your website’s
Google ranking
amazon alexa
google query
google indexing