Website redesigns can have a big impact on SEO. When done right, the improved user experience can improve rankings, but if the redirects aren't carefully mapped, it can go down. When done right, the improved user experience can improve rankings, but if the redirects aren't carefully mapped, it can reduce your authority and cause your website to lose a lot of organic traffic. Let's start by answering the most pressing question right away.
Does redesigning a website affect SEO? Yes, redesigning a website will almost always have an impact on your SEO performance. This is completely normal and you should expect a fluctuation in your website's organic search performance after a website redesign, no matter how you've prepared. This step in the SEO process of website redesign will come much closer to the release date of the redesign. To help your website redesign go smoothly, we'll go over the 10 steps you need to help minimize the negative impact on SEO and improve the signals you send to search engines.
If you're wondering when SEO should be included in the website redesign process, the answer is right from the start. We want to help you avoid or minimize the negative SEO impact of redesigning a website before it's too late. While there are things you can do to help improve your SEO performance after a site redesign, the best thing you can do to reduce your chances of negatively affecting your SEO performance is to consider SEO before the redesign ends. These page elements can have a big impact on search performance and are often forgotten during the redesign process.
However, redesigning a website is also one of the best times not only to maintain search successes, but also the optimal time to understand your existing SEO weaknesses and address them. Changes in the information architecture, the site map and the general content plan in the redesign can affect SEO and ensure that all project members understand how important it is. Depending on how the redesigned site was created, you may have the original installation of Google Analytics and Google Search Console on your site and don't need to make any changes. This change is usually due to serious SEO errors that were made during the redesign, such as not setting up a proper redirection structure, either unknowingly or because SEO was an afterthought of the project.
Performing the SEO audit recommended in point eight before the redesign takes place will help you identify areas that require optimization. In addition to a new look, another objective of your redesign should be to improve the performance of your website (speed, UX, conversions) and this should also include an improvement in your SEO. In reality, this constitutes a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and may result in the redesigned website being penalized in search engine rankings. Clearly, a perfect mobile search experience isn't negotiable now, but many companies continue to prioritize the desktop experience over the mobile experience when redesigning their website, negatively impacting their SEO.
Because you're making major changes to your website, a redesign changes the signals used by search engines to determine how to index and rank your website in search results.
