For certain pages, it’s better to revise the whole website every couple of years rather than “Frankenstein” with some minor changes here and there. But there is always uncertainty in opting for overhaul, arising from the question: could my site lose its SEO rankings in the process?
However, by adopting some of the best practices for SEO and web growth, you will maintain your rankings and benefit from a new platform.
Maintain the URL Layout of the website wherever possible
When redesigning a website, it’s better to maintain all current website URLs, particularly on pages that are ranking organically. Retaining the URL layout means that the site design team will update the design and content of the website, but the URL will remain the same.
Changing the domain address of a page for no reason is not suitable for consumers or search engines. If you’ve spent time creating links and rankings for that website, modifying the URL would risk losing the SEO reputation of that page. To avoid this dilemma, check your existing site map before starting a redesign. When making navigation adjustments or changing page names, your web agency can discuss whether or not it is recommended to change the URL.
There are cases when you need to make significant adjustments to the URL configuration. If your existing site has a very poor page structure and you don’t use a keyword in the name of the URL, you may want to reorganize the site structure to build better SEO results in the long term.
Be alert with 301 redirects
At any point in your site’s lifespan, you would need to uninstall a page or update its URL. It’s important when you do this that you set up a correct 301 redirect. Redirect means that you permanently redirect the initial URL to another live page on your website.
If you do not set up these redirects right, all users and search engines will get a 404 error, meaning that the website cannot be reached. Getting a lot of 404 errors on your website would hurt both your SEO rating and customer experience. If the search engine hits a 404 error when crawling a link, it prevents the crawler from trying to index other sites. This can create indexing errors around the web.
During a web-based overhaul project, you and your web-based team would need to prepare the redirects needed. Before the web goes online, make sure the in-house staff is equipped to set up redirects in the future. Unfortunately, it is normal for clients to take on a new website and not know that removing pages and categories without careful action will lead to errors on the platform.
Enhance your web content
Site overhaul also leads to content analysis and improvement—and understandably so! Many organizations forget to redesign their domain material outside of a web project.
If that was the case for you, your site could contain outdated explanations of your services and goods. Bear in mind, though, that the material on the website has to provide those signals for search engines. When you have pages that score high with a particular keyword, stop dramatically altering the content or removing a lot of important headlines. The H1 and H2 tags on the web page are the most important SEO headings on the web page.
Get assistance with the launch of the website
Launching a new website needs a variety of technical moves, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you may be incorrect to cause downtime or dreaded errors. These errors, in turn, can trigger significant SEO problems.
Usually, an established web developer or web agency should manage the launch. Along with pointing the domain name to a newly built site, a developer may need to run a script to ensure that all URLs on the live site show the correct URL, not the construction of output URL.
You would still need to set up or reconfigure an SSL certificate for the new website. The SSL is set up on the hosting server and once it has been configured, all the website pages will start with HTTPS. For SEO, having an SSL license, and serving web pages over HTTPS, is a small but significant ranking consideration.
Both major browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, can show an alert on a site with mixed content-meaning that the SSL certificate is not correctly set up or configured. Regardless of your search engine issues, these browser alerts might scare web visitors away.
For the first few months after beginning a redesign, it’s just about tracking. Several website problems are very difficult to spot before they are launched, even with the best quality management procedure.
The first place to start is the Google Search Console, a free tool that automatically finds indexing bugs, web functionality bugs, and crawly bugs on your web. You can also choose SEO packages and get assured about SEO rankings.
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