How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

It’s excessively casual to interruption your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what tin go wrong:

• Loss of rankings and traffic.
• Loses of nexus equity.
• Broken pages.
• Sluggish leafage loading.
• Bad mobile experience.
• Broken interior links.
• Duplicate content.

For example, this tract deleted astir 15% of integrated pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted successful an astir 50% integrated postulation nonaccomplishment (orange line). Interestingly, adjacent the maturation of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t assistance it retrieve the traffic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to debar these and different communal issues - conscionable six elemental rules to follow.

Easily overlooked but could prevention the day. A backup ensures you tin reconstruct the archetypal tract if thing goes wrong.

Ask the site’s developer to beryllium prepared for this fallback strategy. All they volition request to bash past is redirect the domain to the folder with the aged site, and the changes volition instrumentality effect astir instantly. Make definite they don’t overwrite immoderate existent databases, too.

It won’t wounded to marque a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting supplier has a backup instrumentality oregon usage a plugin similar Updraft if you’re utilizing WordPress oregon a akin CMS.

Testing your tract for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and mobile friendliness earlier it goes unrecorded is the champion mode to guarantee that your caller tract volition comply with Google’s leafage acquisition guidelines.

The happening is, a website redesign tin earnestly impact tract speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some plan flaws volition beryllium rather casual to spot, specified arsenic excessive usage of animations oregon layout not scaling decently connected mobile devices, but not others, similar unoptimized code.

Ask your tract developer to tally mobile friendliness and CWV tests connected template pages arsenic soon arsenic they are acceptable (no request to trial each azygous page) and inquire for the report. For example, they should beryllium capable to tally Google Lighthouse connected a password-protected website.

Tip

You tin tally these tests yourself connected password-protected sites with Ahrefs if you’re connected the Advanced plan. When mounting up a caller crawl, unfastened the Crawl settings tab.

To trial some desktop and mobile versions, you volition request to tally 2 abstracted tests with the close user agent:

The authentication enactment is right below:

Finally, get a free CWV API key and paste it present (you request to bash this lone erstwhile per project):

Once the crawl is complete, look for the highlighted issues successful the All issues report.

An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues connected your site. And if you bash it pre-and post-launch, you volition easy spot immoderate imaginable caller problems caused by the redesign, particularly those that truly matter, such as:

• Unwanted noindex pages.
• Sites accessible some arsenic http and https.
• Broken pages.

So earlier the caller tract goes, click connected New crawl successful Site Audit and past again close aft it goes live.

Then aft the crawl, spell to the All issues study and look astatine the Change file - caller errors recovered betwixt crawls volition beryllium colored reddish (fixed errors volition be green) .

You mightiness privation to springiness immoderate issues higher precedence than others. See our instrumentality connected the most impactful method SEO issues.

Tip

You tin entree the past of tract audits by clicking connected the project’s sanction successful Site Audit.

By URL structure, I mean the mode web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would beryllium considered URL operation changes:

• ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
• ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
• ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
• ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool

Altering that operation successful an uncontrolled process tin lead to:

• Broken redirects: redirects starring to non-existing oregon inaccessible pages.
• Broken backlinks: outer links pointing to deleted oregon moved pages connected your site.
• Broken interior links: interior tract links that don’t work, hindering tract navigation and contented discoverability.
• Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and hunt engines to find.

Naturally, you should support the aged URL operation unless you’re absolutely sure you cognize what you’re doing. In this case, you volition request to enactment immoderate redirects successful place. On apical of that, marque definite to taxable a sitemap via Google Search Console to assistance Google bespeak changes connected your tract faster.

Redesigns often see immoderate benignant of contented pruning oregon simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But immoderate you do, it’s important that you support the pages that are already ranking high.

Traffic is 1 reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got immoderate backlinks you hazard losing.

To marque definite you’re not cutting retired the bully stuff, usage 2 reports successful Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.

Top pages study is simply a database of each the pages connected your tract ranking successful the apical 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by postulation by default. So, conscionable 1 click connected your left-hand side, and you’ll spot a database of your champion “traffic generators”.

The Best by links study follows the aforesaid logic, but the absorption is connected links (both outer and internal) and it shows each crawled pages connected your tract (not lone the ones ranking successful top 100).

You tin besides plug successful immoderate leafage successful Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and spot whether it tin beryllium chopped without immoderate harm to the site’s integrated performance.

Recommendation

If portion of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you tin inactive get postulation to products you don’t connection anymore if you make an “archive” leafage and nexus to a spot wherever visitors tin find much akin products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands bash that regularly.

This way, you tin inactive fertile for related terms, and the idiosyncratic acquisition is amended than simply redirecting aged products to caller products.

Lastly, if you find yourself successful a concern wherever the caller plan imposes important changes to your top-ranking pages, instrumentality other caution erstwhile altering these elements:

• Keywords successful text, rubric and H1s: changing keywords tin change the page’s relevance for corresponding queries. For instance, if a merchandise leafage ranks for “kick scooter for kids”, you mightiness suffer that if you commencement scratching the operation retired from the important parts of the content.
• Depth of content: expanding oregon reducing contented should beryllium done with the intent to service idiosyncratic needs better, supply much value, oregon clarify existing accusation (i.e., search intent). Keep successful caput that Google rewards helpful, people-first content, and not needfully creative, persuasive copywriting.
• Internal links: changing/cutting a fewer internal links shouldn’t bash immoderate harm, but you request to beryllium tactical astir it - inquire yourself if immoderate peculiar alteration could wounded the ranking. Keep successful caput that interior links assistance the travel of link equity and assistance Google recognize the discourse of pages.
• Distance of that leafage from the homepage: support high-value pages adjacent to the homepage to awesome their value to hunt engines.
• Schema markup: immoderate changes should purpose to accurately picture the contented and instrumentality vantage of eligible schema properties.
• Page speed: don’t overuse dense graphics, animations, and video. Again, marque definite to pre-test the staging tract for CWV and tally a tract audit close aft the launch.

Final thoughts

While an wide tract redesign mightiness dependable similar a bully infinitesimal to present immoderate SEO, you request to deliberation astir the postulation and backlink equity the tract has already earned. If you alteration excessively overmuch successful 1 go, you won’t cognize what worked and why, and possibly much importantly, what didn’t enactment and however to fix it.

Truth is, SEO is ever astir experimentation. You tin person a well-educated guess, but you tin ne'er truly cognize what volition happen.

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