Redesigning your current website is a great opportunity for your company to present itself more professionally. It’s also the perfect chance to adjust your message, layout and format to your ideal audience based on where they are in their buying cycle. You might even have the chance of starting fresh with new design trends that are hot right now!
You may be tempted to go all out and make huge changes, but I personally recommend keeping the design close to your original site. Although redesigning is a great opportunity for growth, you want to make sure that you don’t lose any of your website’s current fans or followers – which means taking extra time to examine all aspects of your brand and adjusting one piece at a time.
What is Website Redesigning?
Website redesigning is the process of evaluating your existing website and improving upon it to meet new goals. It’s a very powerful way to boost your business by presenting yourself in the best possible light. Not only that, but you may be able to tweak things such as search engine rankings or even add elements that increase conversion rates.
Some companies choose to completely overhaul their website designs, while others make minor tweaks to the current layout. Often times a site design will evolve over time as a company’s needs change and grow. It’s a good idea to stay updated on the latest trends in your industry and create new samples of what those changes would look like for you.
You can either redesign the entire website or just plan out the new design and continue with your current site. In my opinion, the latter is the best choice as it will give your current visitors a chance to stay with you and it won’t require any downtime. Plus, if there are problems with your website redesign it’s much easier to correct them on a fresh website than on an older one.
Do Website Redesigns Affect Website SEO?
Unfortunately, website redesigns do affect your SEO. In fact, an improperly done redesign can even get your site penalized or blacklisted.
Think about it – Google’s entire purpose is to deliver relevant content to their users for the keywords they have searched, and if you’re not keeping your website’s properties consistent from a design standpoint,
there is no way that Google will be able to know which page to list.
The good news is that you can prevent a complete loss of search rankings by following a few simple guidelines. A web design company has the knowledge and experience to make sure you don’t mess up your website’s potential to become listed.
7 Tips On How to Redesign Your Site without Compromising Its SEO:
Website redesigning is a great opportunity for growing your business, but you’ll need to make sure that any changes are compatible with how search engines like Google perceive your site.
#1: A New Temporary URL
One of the simplest ways to make sure Google doesn’t lose track of your site is by giving it a completely different URL during the redesign process. It’s easy to do and can be as short as you like:
Your-old-site.com/moved_to_www_newdomain.com
By using this temporary link, Google is able to see the new website and adjust its index accordingly.
#2: Keep Your Site Rank During Design Periods
Another important thing you’ll need to do is maintain your site rank during the design process, especially if you’re running a big redesign that might cause temporary glitches or inconveniences. While there are certainly some good reasons for taking your site down during a redesign, you will want to make sure that it is up and running again before the new design goes live.
#3: Keep Your URL Structure Consistent
Make sure to keep your URL structure consistent throughout the entire process of planning, designing, testing and launching. By doing this you are making it easy for both Google and your visitors to understand the new links. If you must change your URL structure for any reason, make sure to use a tool such as 301 Redirects that will keep the redirect process simple.
#4: Maintain Quality Content
In order to maintain or even increase your current rankings, you’ll want to make sure that the content of your site stays the same or gets even better. Google doesn’t rank websites based on design, it ranks them based on content quality, which is what you are trying to maintain during this process.
#5: Avoid Duplicate Content
Your new website may have a lot of great original content that needs to be added to the search engines, but make sure to avoid any duplicate content during this process. This means that you shouldn’t just repost your old content and change the URL, as it will be considered duplicate content and will likely drop your rankings for both pages.
Your new website may have a lot of great original content that needs to be added to the search engines, but make sure to avoid any duplicate content during this process. This means that you shouldn’t just repost your old content and change the URL, as it will be considered duplicate content and will likely drop your rankings for both pages.
#6: Keep Your Internal Linking Consistent
Since Google has a complete index of all the links on your site, it’s important that you keep all of your internal links and new links consistent. This means that there shouldn’t be any changes in where the links on your site lead to, even if they are leading to different pages with new URLs – an inconsistency like this could confuse Google and make your rankings drop.
#7: Use 301 Redirects for Old URLs
When your site is ready to go live again, you want to make sure that Google isn’t penalized for having two versions of your website. To do this properly, set up 301 redirects so the new version of the website points to the old one. This will ensure that all links are pointing correctly and that search rankings are maintained.
Web design for business is important to make sure that your website is recognized by Google and other search engines.
If you don’t want to lose your SEO while redesigning your website, follow these tips to make the process smooth and ensure your website ranks high on Google.
Work with the best web design company in UK for your website redesigning, contact us today!