Website Redesign: SEO Guidelines and Checklist

The first step of the redesign SEO strategy is to analyze your website and conduct an SEO audit. Here are a few things to audit:

• Performance on search engines and its existing search engine rankings
• Factors like page speed, bounce rate, increase in traffic, conversion rate, etc.
• URL structure and identification of any irrelevant or low-quality links

Based on your audit results, create new goals for your website. Are there any areas where your website could do better?

For instance, Google recommends 2 seconds as the ideal page load speed, though anything under 5 seconds is good. If your site takes longer than that, improving site speed should be one of your website redesign objectives.

A website redesign can sometimes go wrong. In such cases, you’ll need to go back to the original website. Therefore, it’s essential to take inventory of all pages from your existing website, so you can restore those pages.

Also, identify pages that bring the most organic traffic to your site. These could be blog posts, static pages, video pages, landing pages, or research reports. Since these pages contribute most to your SEO, you must keep them. Losing these pages can severely affect your site SEO. Hence, taking an inventory of them is essential.

There are several ways to take inventory of your pages. You can use the XML sitemap, a crawler, or the Google Search Console to get a list of all your website pages.

Once you identify the best-performing pages on your site, minimize the changes you make to them. Since they’re already performing well, there’s no reason to change them. You can tweak the design of the pages if needed, but let the content of the web pages remain the same.

Once you have audited your existing website, set new goals, and taken an inventory of existing pages, begin the web redesign process. However, it’s crucial to make design changes on a staging site (also known as a test site or dev site) and not on the primary site.

There are three reasons to create a new design on a staging site:

• You don’t want your website visitors to engage with your website during the redesign process.
• Search engines may crawl the incomplete version of your site.
• You may not be happy with the redesigned site and want to return to the original version.

Implementing the redesign in a staging environment lets you avoid all these problems. Also, turn on the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option in the Search Engine Visibility section to prevent search engines from indexing your redesigned site. You can turn it off once your site is live.

Once your redesigned website is ready, run some tests to check if it aligns with your objectives. This process is also known as redesign audit. The time needed to audit the new site will depend on the changes you make.

If your redesign process included only a few design and branding changes, there wouldn’t be much to audit. However, the audit will be significant if you have made substantial changes to the design, content, meta descriptions, URL structures, etc.

When auditing your new site, see if the new version meets your website goals. For instance, if your website was loading slowly, check if the new version has a faster loading speed.

Setting up 301 redirects is one of the essential aspects of site redesign SEO. This step is vital if you have changed your URL structure or created new pages to replace older ones. By setting up 301 redirects, you preserve the SEO value of your old page by transferring it to the new URL.

When you have 301 redirects, the older version of your page shows up in the search results, but clicking on it will direct you to the newer version. 301 redirects also make search engines understand that the change is permanent. Hence, implementing 301 redirects is crucial in website design.

Another important thing to address during the website redesign process is 404 errors. A 404 error means the page doesn’t exist. If you see that error, it’s likely because of broken links, or you have deleted the page associated with that URL. The last thing you want is search engine crawlers to crawl up pages with 404 errors.

You can fix 404 errors by setting up 301 redirects from those pages, as discussed previously.

Additionally, look for any other errors, like duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate content, technical SEO problems, etc.

The next step in the website redesign process is to update your site structure and architecture. This step involves organizing all pages of your site to create seamless navigation and the best experience for your visitors.

Ideally, the homepage should be the front page of your site, and it should link to other important pages, like Contact, About, Services, Testimonials, Blog, and more. These pages should have internal links to more pages to give a proper structure to your website. If your previous website version was unorganized, ensure that the new site’s hierarchy is well-structured.

At this step, you need to take care of the technical aspects of your web redesign SEO. Once your new site is live, update its XML sitemap and submit it to Google, Bing, and other search engines. Make sure your robots.txt file links to your new website’s sitemap. Search engines crawl your website when you add the sitemap to the robots.txt file.

It’s also essential to submit your redesigned website’s URL to the Google Search Console to further enhance the site crawl process. Every modern-day content management system (CMS) allows you to update sitemaps and XML sites from one place.

Now that your new site is live, you need to monitor its performance and SEO changes. The key performance indicators (KPIs) you track will depend on your goals. If your aim was to increase search traffic, you could monitor metrics like SEO rankings, new inbound links, etc. If you want to improve page optimization, load speed and bounce rate would be helpful metrics to track.

You can also maintain a search engine journal to compare the performance of your old and new websites.