Introduction
Don’t be afraid of the website redesign. A new look can help boost conversions and increase ROI from adding content or changing features on-site to improved UX design for mobile users. A whole range of adjustments is at hand if you want them in place in just one simple step: redesigning your site.
However, even if you have a team of professionals working on your website, they must know how to retain the SEO value while redesigning the website. A poorly executed redesign can cost a business its high rankings and potential customers.
This infographic shares the extensive website redesigning checklist for 2023.
Infographic
Website redesign is a process to revamp different aspects of your website, such as content, design, and navigation, to boost its functioning and conversions. The redesign may include a domain name change, content update, features/sections addition, UI enhancement, mobile UX optimization, and rebranding.
No matter how many objectives and benefits of website redesigning you have, focussing on SEO performance is crucial to increasing your brand’s online presence. Although professional SEO services can save you from big mistakes, still you need to know how to retain your high-ranking traffic with the redesign.
If your website has been existing for a while, Google already quite clearly understands its content, structure, and relevance to different search queries. When redesigning your website, Google evaluates your website to update knowledge. The bigger website rebuild takes a longer reassessment.
Without a high focus on SEO, the redesign can reduce your traffic and search engine ranking. Let’s say, if you delete a web page, which used to rank high on SERPs, your website traffic decreases significantly.
Here is the ultimate SEO checklist that helps you to learn that. But before going through that, let’s discuss the major reasons for a website redesign and the areas it may influence.
Why Should You Consider a Website Redesign?
Find below the key reasons to redesign your website:
Rebranding or Repositioning
As a business owner, you should change your customers’ perception of your brand to stand out in the crowd, build a unique brand identity, accommodate new products/services, and expand in a new direction.
Rebranding helps you fulfill those wants. This process is much more than changing the brand name and logo. It is about repositioning your brand so it better relates to business goals and target audience needs.
Website redesign is a significant element of rebranding. For instance, Mailchimp, a famous email and marketing automation platform revamped its website in 2018. They added new sections, fonts, colors, logos, and other elements to their website.
New Product/Service Launch
Launching a new product/service needs a website redesign to offer advanced features and functionalities to users. You may not need a website redesign that much when launching a new product or service, but you should maintain a high search engine ranking and traffic.
Make sure you optimize the content of the new product and service pages for search results. You need to connect the future potential traffic to metrics, which reflect your business impact.
Conversion Optimization Dependent on Data-Backed Insights
When your website has acquired the desired amount of traffic but does not succeed much in the conversion area, then you should do a conversion-centric redesign. Your core aim should be to optimize your website so it converts an increasing number of web visitors into leads and genuine customers.
To optimize conversions, you need two types of data – Quantitative and Qualitative.
If you use Google Analytics and other tools, you get data regarding which pages drive maximum conversions, such as where visitors leave your website and which content receives maximum visits.
With email surveys, heat maps, user behavior analysis, and interviews, you get insights from genuine users to guide conversion optimization.
If you have data ready, a website redesign should materialize without affecting SEO. Otherwise, you will lose traffic in place of boosting conversions.
Responsive Website Design Revamp
Mobile devices, like smartphones, comprise over 54.8% of the worldwide website traffic. Moreover, Google’s mobile-first indexing means your website’s mobile version is the parameter for how Google indexes and ranks your website.
So, your website’s mobile UX can increase or decrease your brand’s online visibility, conversions, and revenues. To revamp your website and make it more mobile-friendly, do the following things:
- Use a responsive theme/template, so the content automatically adjusts to a device’s screen size
- Add large fonts and interstitials
- Add large fonts and enough spacing between touch components
- Disable pop-ups and interstitial
- Do many technical activities
When revamping your website, you can assess the mobile-friendliness of your web design with the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. Redesigning for website mobile responsiveness means prioritizing SEO.
SEO and Website Performance Improvement
You should redesign your website to improve search engine ranking. Boosting SEO through redesign includes compressing visuals, implementing an overall keyword strategy, and adding new content.
Tools, like Google Page Speed Insights, help you to evaluate different factors, which affect your website speed and see a list of recommendations that can help you to increase the speed. For instance, unnecessary redirects that you can remove and heavy images, which you can compress.
If you are planning an SEO and performance-centric redesign, the checklists below help to get the desired outcomes.
SEO Checklist for Website Redesign in 2023
You need to consider certain website redesign SEO factors before, during, and after redesigning. The checklists are divided into four stages: pre-design, during design, pre-launch and post-launch.
- Pre-design Stage
- Research Competitors
Perform competitor research to get inspiration from the structure(pages, sections, and keywords) of the top-performing websites in your niche for which they rank. When your website has the same structure as your competitors, your target audience tends to find your brand familiar.
You can check how every section of your website contributes to overall organic traffic and get inspired from the framework of the best-performing sections.
Research Keywords and Map
Keyword research and mapping help you to refine and build your website structure.
Identify the primary and secondary keywords for your top-level pages.
Use Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keywords Planner to find and categorize keywords for your top-ranking pages and content in a spreadsheet. Add competition and monthly search volume data to optimize keywords when redesigning your website.
Map Website Framework Visually
Create a visualization of your new website framework, which you can share with the redesign team. You can use mind map software to create a website visual hierarchy.
Write Copies
If you want to build new landing pages, you should create a rough draft of the keyword-rich copy on wireframes. The web development team makes sure that the redesigning help your landing pages to rank on SERPs.
Design UI
Create 404 pages when designing the UI for new pages. If visitors access URLs, which are no longer available, they must see a 404 error message and a redirect CTA, which leads them to other relevant web pages. So, you create a better UX, retain lost visitors and reduce the bounce rate.
During-Design Stage
Audit Website
Audit existing websites, navigate to the search results report, increase the data range, and filter by pages to find the list of URLs indexed by Google. Export that to generate a CSV list.
You can also crawl your website and check your present SEO data, such as content, redirects, and broken links, and export them to a spreadsheet. Find the pages with the maximum traffic, inbound links, shares, and keywords as these are the assets, which you should protect during the website redesign.
Audit Website
Audit existing websites, navigate to the search results report, increase the data range, and filter by pages to find the list of URLs indexed by Google. Export that to generate a CSV list.
You can also crawl your website and check your present SEO data, such as content, redirects, and broken links, and export them to a spreadsheet. Find the pages with the maximum traffic, inbound links, shares, and keywords as these are the assets, which you should protect during the website redesign.
Set Up the Test/Staging Website With NoIndex Attribute
Make ready staging websites as it functions as a testing environment for a new design. Decide the changes to make in the new design, like URLs to modify or remove. Make sure the new website is indexed in the Robots.txt file.
Make ready staging websites as it functions as a testing environment for a new design. Decide the changes to make in the new design, like URLs to modify or remove. Make sure the new website is indexed in the Robots.txt file.
Upgrade Design with the Old Database
Use the similar title, meta description, and content as on the old design on web pages where content is untouched. Upgrade new pages with a new title, meta description, and content.
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