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Most website owners dread this! It’s a challenging task to revamp a business website without causing any imbalance to the online presence. There’s always a risk of losing out in website data, customers, and crucial search results. It might have some permanent damage to the business bottom-line.
But there’s a solution to everything! When you join hands with an expert SEO agency or consultant, you can resolve these potential damages. So, which step should you take to preserve rankings after redesigning your website? Discussed below are a few important ones:
- Monitor it all
It is one of the most significant steps that you can take. And there’s a chance that website owners make some mistake and don’t realize it till such time it has a fatal impact. Ensure that you stay safe from this by monitoring every aspect. When you plan for a new website design, make sure that you invest in the SEO monitoring tools. It is essential to keep a tab on the critical SEO metrics to detect any disturbance. Monitor the following:
- All the backlinks
- The keywords rankings
- The domain authority
- The organic web traffic coming from search engines
- The spam score
- Website speed
- Citation flow
- Make sure not to do any work on the live website
It is one of the most crucial things to remember, the moment you are making changes to the site. Don’t make changes when the site is live. Make sure that you make the changes on a local server. If you’re making the changes while the site is live, chances are people who visit this website will get frustrated. You can also create a brand-new website on a different domain and then swap it with the original once this gets all ready.
It takes time to implement all the changes on the website. It’s also natural to make mistakes. Hence, it’s better if you don’t get it all done when the site is live.
- You should match the new and old website structure
It’s not a great idea to drastically alter the website structure during the redesigning process. Much before you get started with redesigning, make sure to use a crawler for mapping the entire website. Try and understand the way things get are arranged to be able to match the new site. The moment you complete the website redesigning process, you can crawl the brand-new site and compare its structure to the new site.
- Save every original website data
Do you want to keep some similarity between the new and old websites? If yes, then you can set up a list of every page from your old site. When the URL changes for the new website pages, it is essential to alert the search engine about this through the 301 redirects. If you don’t do that, it will damage all trust and rankings that you have. You might even lose out on the organic web traffic. Make sure to save the website sitemap in a text file for your reference.
1.Resort to a temporary URL for your new site
It is a technique to avert all disruptions when you are transitioning the old site to the new one! You can create the new website on the temporary URL and then copy the previous site on a temporary URL. After that, you can implement all the changes you want. Ensure to non-index the temporary URL. That’s because it’s better not to get noted in the search outcomes until you’re ready. The moment you get done with the brand-new Web design Toronto, make sure to switch the domain and make the site live.
2. Make use of the 301 redirections
Make sure to use the 301 redirects on each page of the old site. All the 301 redirects alert the search engines that a specific webpage URL got changed. It ensures that website users can find the things they’re searching for. Also, the 301 redirects make sure that all the social media links and the bookmarks with the original website are still working when the brand-new site is live.
The moment you create the 301 redirects, ensure that the 301 redirects of each page show the same content in the brand-new site. If you find that tough for the entire single page, ensure that the content is the same. It’s a smart call not to opt-in for the general redirects, as that will disappoint the website users.
3. Track all the backlinks
Most website owners fret this! They don’t want to lose out on the links that they’ve gathered across all these years. Make sure to collate the usage stats for the backlinks. It is one of the best ways to shift the backlinks you earned to the brand-new website. Also, get in touch with the backlinks and request them to alter the links for it to point the brand-new web pages. Just in case you can’t do this, ensure that the rest of the webpages has the 301 redirects.
4. Make use of apt 404 pages
When users do not find the 404 page, it sends a crucial message to the website redesign process. As there are times when the web pages get lost amidst many pages, and sometimes the links don’t work as well. If there’s a decent 404 webpage, then the search engines, as well as the users, will resort their way back to either the data they are searching for or have another place inside the website. Make sure that the 404 page is user as well as search engine friendly. Are you thinking about how to go about it? If yes, you can place the search engine box on the website and keep the website menu to the 404 pages as well.
Every website owner, at some point in time, will want to redesign their website! Retaining the SEO is an essential part as that keeps them on par with the other websites. It is not a smart decision to lose out on the rankings that a site has earned. To ensure good SEO after website redesigning, you can opt-in for the above-mentioned guidelines.
