There comes a time when all the websites need a little redesigning because trends change, the choices of people change and most importantly, the UI/UX features change too. So, it is but very obvious that giving a little extra touch to your website and changing a few things will be worthy of your time and energy. Now, the problem may arise when your website has a strong ranking and you are getting the traffic you want. There are two things you need to take care of, all at the same time. First, you need to redesign your website in the best possible way so that nothing goes wrong and your audience loves the changes you made. Secondly, you need to make sure that the changes you are about to make, they shouldn’t affect your already established and hard-earned ranking and that there’s no reduction in the flow of traffic you already have.
Long story short, you just want your SEO to stay untouched when you are redesigning your website and well, guess what? That is definitely possible if you take some measures. First you should check out the Ultimate Website Redesign SEO Checklist [Infographic] and once that’s done, you then need to follow the tips we are about to give you. Believe it or not, these tips can save you from an SEO disaster so you need to pay all of your attention to this article, right now.
1-Check your website
Don’t start without a plan. We repeat, Don’t start without a plan! Because that can cost you way more than you could ever imagine. When it comes to redesigning a website, you first need to identify the places where you think changes are required. You need to crawl your website, check your pages, your meta descriptions, your URLs and all of the data of your site to see what needs a change. Once you’ve done all the assessment, you then need to come up with a plan and not just any plan, in fact, a solid plan that tells you what to redesign, when to redesign and how to redesign in a way that it doesn’t affect your SEO or your audience.
2-Use Google Analytics
There are tools out there that can do wonders to you in the redesigning regards. You just need to find out the most appropriate tools and then use them for the best of your interests. For example, you can use Google Analytics to perform an audit. What happens is that this tool will help you in identifying the pages that are ranking high on the search engine. This way you will get an insight for the pages that are working for you and those that need some improvement. You’ll know about the pages you are supposed to leave untouched.
3-Backup your data
It’s good to move on, it’s good to think about redesigning your website and never looking back but what’s wiser is to backup the data of your previous design before making any move because you never know when you need that data back. The files, the database etc, just make sure that all of it is just safe with you and you can easily find it if your new design doesn’t work for you.
These are some of the things you need to do to avoid a complete SEO disaster while redesigning your website. So, be careful and follow the tips we just gave because honestly, these tips will work for you in the long run and you are going to love the results.
