How You Can Avoid an SEO Disaster During Your Website Redesign

by WarriorForum.com Administrator
10 replies
  • SEO
  • |
A new article on Search Engine Journal says that redesigning or migrating your website is a huge undertaking, but you can protect your valuable investment with this SEO checklist for website redesigns.



The author says website migrations that don't account for SEO or are undertaken with hasty and/or weak plans for SEO can be disastrous. Here, you'll find important pre-launch and post-launch steps to ensure that SEO is prioritized in your relaunch so you can avoid disaster and enjoy the best possible outcomes for your business:

Before Migration

Think about what it is you're hoping to accomplish with this investment in reimagining your website. Whatever else you hope to gain, you definitely want to protect the value and equity your site has built up over time. You don't want to lose current rankings, link value, or traffic -- and you don't want to spend months to recover or rebuild them, either.

At Launch

At launch time, follow along with the go-live checklist and perform any possible quality control checks of the work you have done on the staging site to date. Don't give the go-ahead for launch if any of your on-page work or redirects are not in place or tested. It is much easier to slightly delay launch than to undo damage later or - exponentially worse - to have to roll back to the old website (ouch).

Post-Launch
  • Check Redirects: Your first step is to go back to your redirect file, old sitemap, and old site crawl to test and ensure that all old site URLs perform 301 redirects to new site URLs, as you intended.
  • Dev-to-Live Audit: Make sure that all pages and specific on-page optimization carried over from the dev site to the live site. This is particularly important for websites with a lot of dynamic content, as sometimes databases and tables get missed in the migration.
  • Code & Performance Validation: Don't assume that the live website will perform the same as the staging site did. Run the homepage and key pages through the mobile-friendly testing tool or Lighthouse audits to ensure the site achieves passing grades.
  • Submit XML Sitemaps: Once you are satisfied with your redirects working properly and the implementation of SEO on the live site, it is time to submit the XML sitemap. Ensure that the dynamic sitemap includes the desired full set of destination URLs.If you are using a static sitemap, generate a new one now, audit it, and submit it.
  • Monitoring: It feels good to be done with the hard work involved in SEO for the relaunch and the migration overall. Now, it's important to shift your mindset to a monitoring phase. For the next 1-2 months, closely monitor Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to watch for reported 404 errors, crawl errors, and any HTML on-page issues detected. Tackle these quickly.
  • Ongoing SEO: Remember that SEO is not a one-time thing. Once the dust has settled and the monitoring phase is in motion, you can go back to your original plan and goals and measure the performance of the new site.
#avoid #disaster #redesign #seo #website
Avatar of Unregistered
  • Profile picture of the author wellnesszing
    You have covered most of the important points one needs to pay attention while a site redesign. My emphasis will be to make sure that all the redirects are done properly and no pages which are already crawled and having some rankings in Google are missing. I will double cross check to see that no crawled page is left out and is being redirected to the corresponding new page.

    Secondly, the new redesigned pages MUST have all the keywords, title and meta like the old ones, unless you exclusively want then to be removed. This will make sure that the new page will not loose the old pages ranking and search engine position.

    Lastly make sure that the new site is light weight, compressed, fast loading and mobile friendly than the old one.

    If you follow these minimum precautions then you are good to go. All the best!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671205].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author ahir thakre
    thank you so much for this information. this point is very important to understand

    (mod edit)
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671236].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author iDigMark
    This left almost no bricks unturned. Concise and informative.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671399].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Stephon Moore
    This is good content. Thanks
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671578].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Jolly Serath
    Nice information for bloggers
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671605].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Bibin T
    Simple technique, Don't change the URL, this can surely dont impact much on SEO
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671763].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author oshimtara
    Your information is extremely valuable. Thanks.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11671805].message }}
  • Very informative post. This post will help us a lot in redesigning the website so that the SEO of the website is not affected.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11673560].message }}
  • Thanks for sharing this valuable information. In my opinion Its a best practice of SEO Marketing to don't change URL's structure while website migration because URLs are the key identity of web pages.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11674273].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by WarriorForum.com View Post

    A new article on Search Engine Journal says that redesigning or migrating your website is a huge undertaking
    You had to read an article to come to that conclusion?

    You guys should have offered up this website as a perfect example of how a migration/redesign can go wrong and destroy a website like the move to the "modern" view did.
    Signature

    For SEO news, discussions, tactics, and more.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11674324].message }}
Avatar of Unregistered

Trending Topics