Even the best-designed websites need a redesign after some time. A website redesign offers a chance to improve user experience, incorporate the best new web design practices and ensure your site aligns with your brand and messaging.
However, you can’t afford to overlook your current search engine optimization (SEO) while planning your website redesign. Building organic SEO can be a long and consistent process, and your hard-earned search engine rankings can take a hit if your website redesign doesn’t consider SEO.
Let’s go over the essential steps to safeguard your SEO during your website relaunch, ensuring your site remains visible and competitive in search results. Whether updating your look or overhauling your entire platform, our website redesign guide and website redesign tips can help protect your online presence and keep your traffic steady. In this article, we’ll delve into:
• Why Should Your Website Undergo a Redesign?
• What Are the Benefits of a Website Redesign?
• How Does a Website Redesign Affect SEO?
• SEO Website Redesign Tips
Why Should Your Website Undergo a Redesign?
Web design trends and user expectations evolve rapidly. A website that looked cutting-edge five years ago might now appear outdated, which could mislead users to think that elements like your content haven’t been updated either.
Redesigning your website helps you stay current, relevant and competitive. Here are some key reasons why your website might need a redesign:
• Outdated Design: A modern, visually captivating website can enhance user engagement and build trust. Even the most sophisticated designs can eventually appear outdated, making your brand seem less innovative and reliable. Regularly updating your design ensures that your website reflects current aesthetics, which can help attract and retain visitors by creating a positive first impression.
• Poor User Experience (UX): Enhancing navigation, load times and mobile responsiveness can enhance user satisfaction. Today’s users demand quick, intuitive and mobile-responsive websites that work on their mobile devices, and any inconvenience can deter them from engaging. UX improvements ensure visitors can easily navigate your site and find what they need across all devices.
• Rebranding: If your business is undergoing a rebranding, your website should reflect your new identity. Consistency across all platforms is crucial for establishing a strong brand presence. A redesign allows you to seamlessly incorporate new logos, color schemes, messaging and overall brand voice into your website, ensuring that it aligns with your updated brand strategy and communicates your new identity.
• New Features and Technologies: Integrating the latest web technologies and features can improve functionality and user interaction. New tools and features become available that can enhance your website’s performance. By proactively incorporating these advancements, such as chatbots, interactive elements or enhanced security features, you can provide a more engaging and secure experience.
5 Benefits of a Website Redesign
Redesigning your website benefits your brand in ways that extend beyond aesthetics. By performing the necessary steps in your website redesign checklist, you can expect rewards such as:
1. Enhanced User Experience
A well-designed website tailored to your brand ensures visitors can easily find what they want. An effective website design can improve retention and reduce bounce rates.
2. Increased Engagement
Modern designs with interactive elements can increase visitor engagement and encourage longer site visits. This can enable users to purchase, schedule an appointment or contact your business for more information.
3. Better Performance
Optimized code, images, faster load times and integrated applications can significantly improve your site’s performance. This can improve user engagement and drive users to stay on your website.
4. Mobile Optimization
Smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming the most commonly used devices to access the Internet. Most websites today need to adapt their web design to fit smaller screens. With more users accessing websites via mobile devices, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is crucial.
5. Improved SEO
A redesign lets you implement the latest SEO website relaunches. This can boost your search engine rankings, improve your visibility and drive traffic to your website.
How Does a Website Redesign Affect SEO?
A website redesign can significantly impact your SEO, both positively and negatively, which is why it’s important to consider SEO in your website redesign checklist.
Ideally, you can redesign website without losing SEO ranking by preserving or altering your strategy as needed. Here are areas that can affect SEO when redesigning a website:
• URL Structure Changes: Changing your URL structure without implementing proper redirects can result in 404 errors and loss of link equity. Search engines and users will find broken links, hurting rankings and user experience. Using 301 redirects ensures your SEO value is preserved and transferred to the new URLs.
• Content Changes: Removing or altering content can result in losing valuable keywords and indexed pages. Search engines rely on quality content relevance for indexing, meaning significant changes can disrupt your rankings. It’s crucial to analyze which content performs well and ensure it is retained or redirected to maintain SEO value.
• Technical SEO: Your site’s architecture, loading speed and mobile friendliness can significantly impact your SEO performance. Improving site speed and ensuring mobile optimization can enhance user experience and boost rankings, as search engines prioritize fast and mobile-friendly sites. Technical issues that arise during an SEO website redesign, like slow load times or poor mobile design, can negatively impact your SEO.
• Metadata Updates: Changing meta tags without optimization can impact your search rankings. Meta titles and descriptions are crucial in how search engines interpret and display your content. It is essential to optimize these elements for relevant keywords and ensure an accurate description of your content to maintain and improve SEO.
• Internal Linking: Optimizing internal linking can affect your site’s crawlability and indexation. Search engines use internal links to understand the structure and importance of pages on your site. Maintaining a logical and SEO-friendly internal linking structure helps search engines crawl and index your site more effectively, preserving your rankings.
Ideally, you should have a site redesign SEO checklist with these factors in mind when redesigning your website. This website redesign checklist allows you to track how your changes can impact your existing SEO and your search engine rankings.
8 SEO Website Redesign Tips
Your website redesign doesn’t have to impact your existing SEO when redesigning a website. To preserve or ensure your website redesign positively impacts your SEO, here are a few SEO website redesign tips. Add these to your site redesign SEO checklist to preserve or improve your SEO during this change.
1. Conduct an SEO Audit
Before redesigning your website, perform a comprehensive SEO audit to understand your current performance and identify areas for improvement. This audit will help you pinpoint which pages drive the most traffic and which keywords are most valuable to your site. Understanding your SEO strengths and weaknesses can help you make data-driven decisions.
2. Retain URL Structure
Keep your existing URL structure as much as possible. Modifying URLs can result in broken links and decreased page authority, potentially impacting your search rankings. If changes are unavoidable, Thrive’s Demand Gen SEO Strategist Ken Romero recommends setting up 301 redirects “to maintain SEO authority.” This ensures that users and search engines are guided to the appropriate pages, safeguarding link equity and minimizing disruptions.
3. Optimize Content
Optimize your new content for relevant keywords and user intent. Retain high-performing content and integrate it into the new design to maintain its SEO value. Craft all new content carefully with SEO best practices, including keywords, headings and internal linking, to enhance your search engine visibility.
4. Maintain Metadata
Preserve your existing meta titles, descriptions and headers. These elements are critical in how search engines understand and rank your pages. However, Romero recommends updating these to reflect your new brand identity if you plan to rebrand. Make updates where necessary, but maintain their SEO-friendliness by including relevant keywords and accurately representing the content on each page.
5. Improve Site Speed
Optimizing images, leveraging browser caching and minimizing JavaScript can improve your site’s loading speed. Site speed plays a critical role in search engine rankings, and a faster site significantly enhances user experience, leading to lower bounce rates. You can improve your SEO and user satisfaction by focusing on performance optimizations during the redesign.
6. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness
Use responsive design techniques to ensure your site performs well on all devices. With a growing number of users accessing websites via mobile, having a mobile-friendly site is crucial for SEO. A responsive design seamlessly adjusts to different screen sizes, ensuring a consistent and superior user experience across devices.
7. Monitor Analytics
Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor your site’s performance before, during and after the redesign. These tools provide valuable insights into traffic patterns, user behavior and potential issues. By consistently monitoring your analytics, you can detect and resolve any SEO issues that may emerge during the redesign.
8. Test SEO Website Relaunch
Before going live, thoroughly test your redesigned site for broken links, missing pages and other potential issues. Testing for broken links, missing pages and other potential issues is crucial to identifying and fixing any errors before they impact users and search engines. This step is crucial for maintaining a smooth transition and preserving your SEO.
Launch Your Site Redesign Successfully With Thrive
A website redesign can revitalize your online presence, but it must be handled carefully to protect your hard-earned SEO. By following our website redesign guide, meticulously maintaining key SEO elements and monitoring performance throughout the process, you can ensure that your redesign not only preserves but enhances your search engine rankings.
Want to learn how to redesign website without losing SEO? Thrive’s full-service digital marketing agency ensures you have a team ready to handle every aspect of your website. Suppose you want to take the first steps toward rebranding or updating your website and don’t want to risk your existing SEO. We are happy to consult for a website redesign guide or guide you through a site redesign SEO checklist to optimize your plans.
Contact us today to discuss your project and learn how we can ensure a seamless transition for your SEO website relaunch and redesign website without losing SEO.
