Website Redesign SEO Checklist: Tips to Avoid Big Drops in Your Rankings

If your website is no longer reaching its potential, then it might be time for a redesign. One case study acquired heads improved by 314 percentage following a website redesign and SEO campaign.

Although redesigns can be expensive, it’s a better alternative than bleeding fund year after year with an inefficient website.

When redesigning your website, it’s important you avoid the dangers that can gravely hamper your SEO. To help you do this, here’s my website redesign SEO checklist.

What Is a Website Redesign?

A website redesign involves large-scale changes to your website. During a redesign, a number of aspects of your system, content, structure, and visuals may change dramatically, giving your site a totally fresh look.

This is a natural–and important–part of a website’s development. As much as 50 percent of consumers believe website blueprint was part of a company’s brand.

Even if you had the greatest website in the world back in 2001, it would be looking very out of place today if you didn’t make any big an amendment of it. Here’s what an Amazon web page was like back in 2001.

Design best traditions vary, engineering alters, and your target audience’s possibilities change; your website needs to change to keep up.

Accessibility plays a big part as well. When visiting a site for the first time, 38 percent of parties will look at the page’s layout or navigational links.

Sometimes these will necessitate procreating smaller mutates as part of a website refresh, but seldom, you’ll need to fix more large-scale changes in the form of a full-scale website redesign. Either way, you need to make sure you are following current best practises so your website redesign SEO isn’t affected.

Benefits of a Website Redesign

Website redesigns aren’t without threat( especially for website redesign SEO ), but when doing well, they render substantial upside. They can 😛 TAGEND

improve SEO and place performancesimplify the user experiencerefocus your material strategygive your site a faceliftoffer faster consignment speedsprovide up to date security

The most obvious benefit is since your website dishes as a modern-day shop front, you want to make it handsome.

If a physical accumulate has a broken sign, good illuminate, and a dingy interior, it’s going to struggle appealing to people. It’s the same for an internet site; if it examines tired and behind the times, your visitors are going to wonder if your business is tired and out of date as well.

A website redesign is about more than exactly a facelift.

It too gives you an opportunity to change the fundamental structure of your website and make it easier for visitors to navigate. You want to start with the privilege coming since even doing a simple redesign with basic boasts can take an average of two months to complete.

Businesses change over time, and as their websites progress and develop naturally, such structures of the website can become messy. You supplemented brand-new content lists, move things around on your nav disallow, button mother and child pages, and so on.

A simple rule when it comes to design and UX is that complicated design is rarely good. You want to make it as simple as possible for your visitors( and bots) to navigate your locate and find what they’re looking for. A website redesign is a great opportunity to do this.

This is an ideal time to evaluate your place, decide on your goals, and create a redesign strategy that allows you to achieve them.

When Are Website Redesigns Necessary?

According to a 2020 overlook, here are the top reasons for a website redesign 😛 TAGEND

low-spirited changeover proportions (8 0.8 percentage) high-pitched ricochet rates( 65 percentage) needs better UX( 61 percent) not accept on all inventions( 53.8 percentage) outdated website( 38.5 percentage) not SEO-friendly( 23.1 percent)

It can be tricky to know when a website redesign is necessary. Probabilities are, you’re investing a good hunk of money in your redesign, so you want to get the era right.

The thing to remember is user experience is absolutely essential in digital marketing. It’s going to show in almost every metric and, eventually, it’s going to have an impact on your bottom line.

The metric closest to most website owners’ centers is transition charge. This can be a big sign that it’s time for a website redesign.

Conversion paces fluctuate, but if yours is in a downward spiraling, then it might be time to consider a website redesign. They are also different depending on your industry.

For example, if your website is part of the Real Estate or Home Improvement industries, your changeover frequencies will be around 7 percent. However, if you are part of the Media& Entertainment industry, it might be closer to 18 percent.

One of the best ways to know if it’s time to make changes to your website is to use it from the point of view of your visitors. Imagine you’re inspect your area for the very first time and ask yourself these simple questions 😛 TAGEND

Does the branding seem on-point? Do pages load rapidly? Is your website are set out in a logical mode that’s easy to steer? Are your pages optimized for portable? Is it difficult to find the information you’re looking for? Is your patron wander reorganized fairly?

Compare your website to your opponents and be seen to what extent you heap up. If you find your locate is good in certain areas but missing a few items in others, a website refresh might be the answer. If there are lots of things hampering you back on the other hand, then it’s probably meter for a full website redesign.

Website Redesign SEO Considerations Before Getting Started

The top conclude tourists leave a website is due to slow loading seasons — 88.6 percent of survey respondents in a 2020 canvas validated this. Page hastened directly and indirectly affects SEO.

This is just one reason to be vigilant about multiple factors that can affect website redesign SEO — contriving a redesign isn’t something that should be taken lightly. The rewards are great when things go right, but can be a nightmare if things do go wrong.

The first step is to consider your goals.

What do you want out of your website redesign? What reasonable targets are you able placed?

To set the claim aims, you’ve got to have some standards for your current website performance. Make use of your analytics and come up with SMART objectives.

Once you’ve come up with your goals, then you can begin thinking about a timeline. The important part here is to be realistic. As you’ll see in the website redesign SEO checklist, there are a lot of steps to consider, so make sure you give yourself sufficient time to do a great job.

Then you’ll need to put together the claim team to carry out your imagination. You’ll need talented designers, developers, and content managers to ensure things race smoothly, but don’t underestimate one key element: communication.

Your team needs to be working together and communication is extremely important.

Website Redesign SEO Checklist

This website redesign SEO checklist will help you stay planned throughout the entire process and make sure you don’t miss anything important.

1. Audit Your Existing Content

Content abilities countless websites’ organic attendance. Eighty-two percent of purveyors actively use content marketing, and many successful industries are constructed off of it.

A website redesign SEO process be given the opportunity to make your content efforts to the next statu, but first, you’ve got to have a good picture of where it’s at.

First, use a tool like Screaming Frog to pluck data on all URLs included in your website.

Next, use your analytics and Ubersuggest to perform a complete content examination to determine your most important pages, envision which pages are irrelevant or not needed anymore, and which should be redirected or combined with other pages.

Follow these steps and you should have a clear idea of which pages( and keywords) are most important. Look at your traffic stats, standings, and changeover goals to see where other improvements can be made.

2. Update Information Architecture

Over 60 percent of users report leaving a website due to bad sailing. Although website navigation and information design( IA) are different, your IA should inform how your website sailing is structured.

Information architecture is about how you coordinate report in your sitemap. Navigation is how you organize your website.

As mentioned earlier, 38 percent of people will look at a site’s organization and navigational associates on their first visit.

Let’s use this pattern announce: “How to Scale Mt Everest.”

If people have to find it by steering through a gratuities page, then climbing policies, then Asian pinnacles, before ultimately clicking Mt Everest, it’s going to be nearly impossible to find.

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if the process could simply be Peaks> Mt Everest> How to Scale Mt Everest?

How you plan report all depends on what your website is about, why people come to your site, and what information is most valuable.

To update your IA 😛 TAGEND

Start by creating a map of your current structure.Do competitor analysis to see how your tournament coordinates their websites.Use a tool like Hotjar to see where users sounds and how they interact with your site.Using note cards or post-its, write down the main categories for your site.Next, write your subheadings based on the data you’ve collected.Write down the URLs for sheets you continue, and plan them under the subheadings.Create a brand-new sitemap based on what you created.

3. Carefully Map URL Redirects

In a Semrush study that analyzed 150,000 websites, 42.5 percent of the websites considered had broken internal relations.

At the beginning, I mentioned how website redesign SEO processes aren’t without jeopardy. The greatest of those risks is the potential of losing a great deal of the hard work you put into building your organic profile.

A website redesign is going to change such structures of your entire area. Some sheets will get moved, some will even get deleted.

The thing is, small change can make a big difference in SEO land. As much as 60 percent of marketers say SEO and content marketing is their biggest source of leads.

Let’s go back to our amazing section on “How to Scale Mount Everest” that’s bringing in lots of organic freight.

The problem is you announced it in a category that’s not very precise, and you applied it a chaotic URL structure. Naturally, you want to fix this, so you vary the category and URL.

You haven’t even touched the contents, but this change can have immense results. This is because there are associates out there already pointing back to the old URL, so when people( and bots) be complied with, they end up at a space page.

Unless you use URL redirects, you’re not only losing your referral traffic, but you likewise lose the page and domain authority those backlinks have already built up.

Essentially, your well-established and successful article has to start from scratch all over again.

Redirects are able to obtain very muddled with a large website, so it’s important to carefully map them.

How to delineate URL redirects 😛 TAGEND

Create a roster of all URLs you are keep as well as those you will no longer be using.Create another roster of content you plan to keep that will be under a new URL.Match each old URL with its new URL. For the URLs you are getting rid of, competitor each to new material that plows a same topic. Give the listing of new material planning situations to developers to implement the redirects.

4. Optimize Content You’re Keeping

After doing your content investigation, you should have a good idea of what content you plan to keep. If you’ve leant the time and effort into your examination, you will likely have pennant some areas of improvement for some of your best pages.

A website redesign is a perfect chances to refresh age-old material and contribute it a brand-new rental of being. This process alone can increase organic freight by as much as 106 percentage.

Content decay is real. New information comes to illuminated, challengers invest in their content, and abruptly your best sheets have been propagandized down the rankings.

Click through frequencies for the top organic rankings drop off exceedingly instantly 😛 TAGEND

1st decision: 34.2 percent2nd arise: 17.1 percent3rd upshot: 11.4 percent4th decision: 8.1 percent5th cause: 7.4 percentage

Dropping from the top rank can immediately cut your organic traffic in half, so it’s important to optimize your existing sheets.

Your website redesign SEO should help with the UX side of things, but what else are you able do to improve content positions again?

Use Google Search Console or an SEO tool like Ubersuggest to see how your content is performing.See what keywords your top-performing content pieces are grading for. To improve those positions even more, contributed target keywords to headers, increase keyword concentration( without cram) throughout the post, and use keywords in idol alt verse and file names.Dig into content that isn’t performing well. Make increases by rewriting it or revising it with recent connections and studies as well as data points, expert interviews, and visuals or videos.

5. Optimize Page Speed

You can’t underestimate the importance of page rate. Everyone knows the feeling of waiting forever for a sheet to laden, and you know what users do when that happens; they leave and look for information elsewhere.

Technology has uttered beings expect things much faster these days, and interacting with a website is no different. 25 percent of people leave a website if the sheet takes more than four seconds to load, and a one-second delay decisions in a 16 percent drop in customer satisfaction.

Websites tend to become bloated over day. A website redesign SEO process let’s you take the opportunity to optimize page rapidity by deal with the bloat.

First, you want to make sure images are optimized to the correct size and format. Make embedded videos load properly and, if they don’t, use tools to decrease the file size or shortened the videos.

Next, shorten the number of HTTP petitions. You should also minify your CSS and JavaScript, and clean up your HTML.

This should be something you consider from the very start of your redesign, and you need to stress it as a priority for your developer.

6. Update Your XML Sitemap

Your XML sitemap is like your website blueprint. Google and other search engines use it to understand the purpose of your material and it’s crucial for good website redesign SEO.

You can either do this manually by adding every URL in your revised area to the map or use an SEO plugin like Yoast or AIOSEO to generate one automatically.

This is a simple but important step. If Google is looking at an faulty XML sitemap, their crawlers may discount your site only( as confirmed by Google’s John Mueller ).

7. Test Your Site After Redesign Is Complete

Across the internet, 0.27 percentage of internal links are broken and 1.37 percent of external links are broken. Broken links are just one of the many issues you need to consider when testing your website after a redesign.

Redesigning an entire website is a huge undertaking so every detail isn’t going to come out perfect straight away.

If you propel your new site immediately without testing it first, these insufficiencies can have big consequences.

It’s tempting to get the ball wheel and start with your new website as speedily as possible, but you’ve got to positioned time into testing. Review all of the changes on your evaluation place( get your friends and family on board as well) and go through the website with a fine-tooth comb.

You is generated by specific tasks for everyone involved in user testing your area.

research CTAstest site navigation( it should make sense and all invoices/ piloting attaches should be clickable) look at side navigation linksreview anatomies, pop-ups and depart overlays if you use themaudit internal and external linkspay close attention to interactive material and obtaining pageshave beings text on desktop, tablets, and portable devices( Android and iOS)

Add any faults you find to a spreadsheet and go through them with your developer.

Again, it’s about exploring your website through the eyes of your target audience. If you do this well, then you’ll fix a lot of wrongdoings before they reach the end-user.

Website Redesign SEO Frequently Asked Questions

How much do website redesigns change SEO?

Website redesigns can have a big impact on SEO. When done well, the improved UX can boost standings, but if the redirects aren’t carefully mapped, it is feasible lower your jurisdiction and result in your website losing a lot of organic traffic.

How much do website redesigns for SEO cost?

The costs of a website redesign will depend on the complexities involved in your website. Basic redesigns can start at around $15,000 but more complicated ones can expenditure upwards of $75,000.

What are the most common SEO errors in website redesigns?

Some of the most common SEO faults with website redesigns are forgetting to redirect URLs and not retaining your more successful content.

What SEO tools do I need for website redesigns?

SEO implements are useful for website redesigns because they allow you to evaluate your execution. Your Google Analytics is essential, but grading checkers like Ubersuggest can also be very useful.

” @context”: “https :// schema.org”,

” @type”: “FAQPage”,

“mainEntity”:[

” @type”: “Question”,

“name”: “How much do website redesigns feign SEO? “,

“acceptedAnswer”:

” @type”: “Answer”,

“text”: ”

Website redesigns can have a big impact on SEO. When done well, the improved UX can boost rankings, but if the redirects aren’t carefully planned, it can lower your dominion and to be translated into your website losing a lot of organic traffic.

”

,

” @type”: “Question”,

“name”: “How much do website redesigns for SEO cost? “,

“acceptedAnswer”:

” @type”: “Answer”,

“text”: ”

The costs of a website redesign vary the complexities involved in your website. Basic redesigns can start at around $15,000 but more complicated ones can cost upwards of $75,000.

”

,

” @type”: “Question”,

“name”: “What are the most common SEO flaws in website redesigns? “,

“acceptedAnswer”:

” @type”: “Answer”,

“text”: ”

Some of the most common SEO inaccuracies with website redesigns are forgetting to redirect URLs and not obstructing your more successful content.

”

,

” @type”: “Question”,

“name”: “What SEO tools do I need for website redesigns? “,

“acceptedAnswer”:

” @type”: “Answer”,

“text”: ”

SEO tools are useful for website redesigns because they allow you to evaluate your carry-on. Your Google Analytics is essential, but grading checkers like Ubersuggest can also be very useful.

”

]

Conclusion: Website Redesign SEO

There comes a go when you need to think about website redesign SEO. This is an important moment for your business, and it needs to be handled with care.

A website redesign carries a lot of jeopardies when it comes to SEO, but at the same time, it can offer lots of reinforces. To maximize those payoffs and minimize the risks you need a clearly defined strategy and that is where this website redesign SEO checklist can help.

That plasters the SEO side, but I’ve likewise got some more tips on how to safely carried out under a website redesign, so check them out.

Are you planning a website redesign? Let me know in the comments below!

Read more: neilpatel.com