15 Tips To Save Your SEO Rankings When Redesigning Your Website

• By Joseph Schneider
• 17-09-2021
• SEO

1) Take Backups of Current Website

Redoing your website is a long process. Any number of things can go wrong during the process. It is a good practice to back up your old website. Take a complete backup of everything. Copy all the content, images, plugins, and themes to be safe. Keeping a handy backup lets you revert to the old site in case of delays with the new site. You save your SEO efforts and keeps your business going in case of issues with the new site.

Taking a site backup is easy and safe. There are many great tools out there that can help you with it. A website backup software makes a copy of the entire site while keeping the site structure and intact. It also preserves the metadata for any optimization on the pages. This ensures that you can revert to the old site without losing any SEO efforts and continue with business as usual.

2) Inventory All Site Pages

Every single page on a website helps towards better SEO. You should keep stock of all these pages before you begin migrating to a new site. Doing so will help you know the SEO actions performed on crucial web pages. There are many ways to inventory your site.

You can do one or more of the following:
Use a crawler: Crawlers map every web page on your site and create a list of URLs. Screaming Frog is a popular crawler and is free to use for sites with less than 500 pages.

Use your Sitemap: You can generate a Sitemap using several tools and plugins. Many new content management systems have this feature built in.

Use Google Indexing or Search Console: Use the Google index if your website is small with fewer pages. Else, you can use the Google Search Console to find a list of all the pages on your site.

3) Prepare an "Under Maintenance" Page
Broken links on your website are bad for SEO. They provide a poor user experience and reduce your credibility with search engines.

Broken links or pages with errors are inevitable when you are redesigning the site. Creating an 'under maintenance' page can reduce the loss of SEO during this time.

Put your site's primary pages in this mode until you have any issues worked out. The maintenance page should do the following:
Tell your users that your site is changing.

Provide a timeline on when they can expect you to be back.

Provide alternate channels. This could be a phone number, an email address, or a temporary URL to use your services.

If possible, do all the redesign on a temporary URL. Keep your current site active for users until you're sure the redesign is flawless. This tactic will preserve your SEO KPIs. If not, ensure that you are keeping customers informed of the site overhaul.

4) Benchmark Current SEO Standings

Collect as many SEO metrics for KPIs as possible before a redesign. Every single SEO-related data is valuable. Comparing SEO data for the new website with the old is a best practice to keep your SEO efforts on track.

Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you with this exercise. Capture any scores or data from your top-performing pages and blogs. The main metrics to compare are:

Keyword rankings
Organic traffic
Page load times
Backlink referrals
Conversion ratios

These have the highest impact on SEO and can be useful metrics to benchmark against your redesigned site. Other useful KPIs to compare are bounce rates, dwell time and reaction to your content design.

It is normal to see a slight dip in your before vs. after SEO metrics. However, watch out for large gaps in the numbers. This could be a red flag that your site redesign has issues and needs review.

5) Setup and Test 301 Redirects

301 redirects are ways by which you can send your users from an old website link to a fresh URL. A proven good practice is to keep your old and new URL structures similar. The URL text is one of the factors that impact SEO. It is because they may contain keywords you target for your business.

Make sure that every old page has a 301 redirect to its counterpart on the redesigned site. It's alright to redirect to a relevant page if no similar page exists in the new avatar of the site.

301 redirects are preferable to 401 errors which halt the user's journey. It isn't pleasant for the user experience as well as SEO. Use an appropriate plugin or CMS software to perform this activity.

Perform a redirect audit soon after a redesign. You can automate this process, generate a report, or test the most popular pages to ensure the redirects are working.

6) Minimize Design and Content Changes

Your customers are familiar with your old site and content. It is what makes up your brand voice. Drastically changing it throws them off guard. Any site redesign can affect not only SEO but also customer sentiment.

Be sure to work on the redesign in a planned manner. You must take into account the main elements on your site that are responsible for good SEO—for example, keywords, site structure, and URL names.

Try and maintain the same structure for site headings. Site structure in this context refers to the URL structure and hierarchy. A few page URLs or structure changes are inevitable. These can be handled through 301 redirects. Things get complicated when the changes are one too many.

Keep your content as unchanged as possible. Your content contains target keywords that are fundamental to good SEO. Changing the content without keyword planning leads to a drop in SEO scores.

7) Notify Customers Through Marketing/Support Channels

A new website design is a necessity at times. It could be due to recent design trends in the industry or to give your brand a fresh look and feel. Failing to follow a few best practices during a redesign can negatively impact your SEO rankings.

As discussed earlier, put up 'under maintenance' pages to let visitors know. Another good practice is to notify regular customers of the redesign proactively. You can rope in your marketing and sales teams to connect with registered customers.

Send out emails or SMS notifications. It must inform users to expect a downtime during the time window when you transition to the new design. Doing this will prevent poor user experience, which is the main reason for lower SEO scores.

If customers use your site to log support requests, share a contact number or email address. This can be an alternative method to reach you until the redesigned site is live.

8) Check for Link Issues

After the redesign, test again. You may have done this at various stages of the redesign but validate it once more. Run a link checker tool to verify that any new links or redirects are not broken. This step is crucial when going live. It is tedious to take the site down to fix these issues once customers start using it.

Login to webmaster tools (Google or Bing) and confirm if the site is still verified. Verify it again in case it isn't. This will ensure that you can monitor how Bing and Google are indexing it.

The URL inspector tool in Google Search Console is a nifty tool for URLs. It scans all URLs and tells you if there are issues. Click 'Request Indexing' to get the indexing process completed fast.

Following these steps will ensure that redirects are correct without any loss in SEO and other KPIs.

9) Set up and Submit an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a list of all the vital pages of your website. This could include the home page, landing pages, or specific product pages. Optimizing your XML sitemap is an integral part of SEO. Doing so will enable search engines to map its content more effectively.

XML sitemaps quickly tell the search engine about the content on a page and its relevance to a user query.

A redesigned site will contain new URL structures or naming conventions. It will include a few or more changes compared to your older sitemap. Submit the new sitemap to search engines. Without it, you will lose SEO rankings fast.

Search engines use the new XML sitemap to validate links and index them. Do this every time your make site structure changes to prevent a drop in your core SEO KPIs.

10) Optimize Images and Videos

Images and videos on a site attract visitors. Visual components such as banners, buttons, and messaging are vital to a great user journey. But remember, images and videos also take up more space on your servers. The larger they are, the slower they load on poor internet connections. This has a direct impact on your SEO scores. In fact, site loading time is one of the main KPIs search engines use to rank your site.

Here are a few things to keep in mind to prevent SEO score loss:

Retain the exact images, make them smaller in size, or remove them if they don't add value.
Embed video URLs on the site to link to YouTube or Vimeo instead of hosting them on the site.
Run speed tests on the site before and after the redesign to check for factors affecting speed.
Optimizing visual content on your site will help you gain better SEO scores on the new site.

11) Prepare and Launch New Site

When you have covered all the steps above, it's time for the big day. Create a checklist for the launch day. Turn off maintenance mode settings on the site. Ensure that you have enough people ready to work on the technical aspects in case of glitches or downtime.

Launch your site by backing up the content on the staging server and moving it to the live URL. Check your ROBOTS.txt file. This is the file that allows search engines access to the entire new site. Check to ensure it's configured right.

It's a good idea to have a short feedback or survey for visitors. Please don't make it too long that it disrupts browsing. Ask simple questions that tell you if they encountered errors on the site or significant design issues. Run through your launch day checklist to ensure a smooth transition with minimal impact on critical SEO KPIs.

12) Audit Site Performance After Launch

A post-launch audit is a quick way to weed out any glaring issues. You may have done your checks during launch but performing an audit 2-3 days after launch is imperative.

Here are a few things to look at when you are auditing:
Test your top-performing content with an SEO checklist. The checks should typically include keyword rankings, backlinks, rank checks, and bounce rates.
Check the size and formatting of images, titles, and headings.
Run a speed test to pinpoint any significant loading issues.
Check the new design on a mobile device to see if it loads and behaves as designed.
Check and fix any 404 errors listed on the sitemap.
Check if the site design looks and feels consistent across various web browsers. Do the same for mobile browsers too.
Gather feedback and bug reports from users. Get your design and technical team to address as many of them as possible.

13) Check for Common Issues

Any website redesign effort hits minor snags at the outset. Being prepared to look for and fix these issues gives you an edge. Fixing site issues after launch quickly goes a long way in maintaining your previous SEO rankings.

We told you a few mandatory checks during a post-launch audit. Here are a few more common issues that you should be aware of:
Missing or incorrect meta-data: This is bound to happen during a redesign. Look at the top pages on your site at a granular level and add or refresh the correct metadata as needed.

Monitor internal links: Internal links, the ones that lead users to content within your site, are often missed. Be sure to run an audit on all internal links among your pages and content. Ignoring these links can lead to a drop in SEO rankings.

14) Compare Old vs. New SEO KPIs

Set up a monitoring cadence. You can configure several manual and automated tools to gather data for your main KPIs. SEMRush and the Google Search Console are great options. Some metrics like visitor traffic are helpful to look at daily. Others like keyword positions and conversions need to be monitored weekly.

Remember that it's normal for metrics to show some gaps for the first few weeks after the new launch. Search engines need that much time to calibrate your new design and content. Keep a lookout for wide gaps in your before vs. after SEO KPI scores. If you notice significant drops in visitor traffic or an increase in bounce rates, it's time to relook at the content and design elements.

It's a good practice to minimize content changes to pages that were already performing well. Be diligent in your monitoring and conduct review meetings as and when needed.

15) Backup Regularly

You may have cases where you want to restore an older version of a page or revert to the older site. Keeping regular backups of both these versions is essential to prevent downtime. Any site downtime means loss of traffic and business. These factors directly affect your SEO scores.

You can restore any top-ranking content if you see drops in SEO or technical issues with the page. Automate the process to prevent misses.

Keep the sitemaps of the new and old versions handy. It will help you identify missing pages fast and work on restoring any linking or redirect issues.

Continue optimizing your pages for on and off-page SEO and monitor their performance. You should see healthy growth in your SEO scores over time.