If you feel like your current website is old or it does not deliver the expected results, it may be the time for a redesign. While revamping the website design and updating content, it’s very important to prioritize the SEO highly.

Make sure you follow the solid SEO strategy during the redesign process which is the key to maintain strong search engine rankings. Neglecting this fact can affect your organic traffic.

Check out our complete SEO Checklist to follow during your website redesign process, which ensures your site maintains its search engine rankings. Choose the best SEO Company in Toronto for all your complete SEO needs.

 

Key TakeAways:

1. Prioritize SEO in redesign to maintain rankings and organic traffic.
2. Redesign improves design, content, and user experience (UX).
3. Neglecting SEO can lead to traffic loss and ranking drops.
4. Analyze current site performance using tools like Google Analytics.
5. Preserve high-performing content to maintain SEO value.
6. Set up 301 redirects for deleted or outdated pages.
7. Optimize page speed by compressing media and removing unnecessary code.
8. Update sitemap.xml after redesign for search engine indexing.
9. Thoroughly test the site for performance and functionality.
10. Monitor analytics post-launch to track redesign success.

 

Table of Contents:

1. Key Takeaways
2. What is a Website Redesign?
3. Why Should SEO Be a Priority in Your Website Redesign?

         a. Retaining Organic Traffic

         b. Preventing SEO Issues

         c. Protecting Search Rankings

         d. Maximizing New SEO Opportunities

4. Website Redesign SEO checklist

          a. Analyze Your Current Site and Content

          b. Prioritize the high performing content

          c. Don’t forget 301 redirects

          d. Optimize your page speed

          e. Update your Sitemap.xml file

          f. Test your new redesigned website

          g.  Always have a look at your analytics

 

What is a Website Redesign?

A website redesign is the process of transforming your site’s design, functionality, content and overall performance. This involves revamping components such as code, content, visual design and the site’s information.

The main goal of a redesign is to improve the user experience(UX) of your site. If you are thinking that your website looks outdated among the competitors or if you are facing high bounce rates and lower conversions, in such scenarios redesigning the website will help the site look fresher, perform well and also engage the users much better.

It is recommended for the business to revamp their websites every two to three years. The digital world is evolving faster and if your website is still static and outdated, it will surely create a negative impact on user experience. Regular updates are essential for keeping the site aligned with modern trends and user expectations.

A successful website redesign improves the site’s structure and functionality without negatively impacting the organic traffic or search rankings. Redesign may cause a temporary drop in search engine rankings but as you recrawl after site revamping , your rankings will be back to normal.

 

Looking for the best website redesign best practices? Then check out our blog for more detailed view.

 

Why Should SEO Be a Priority in Your Website Redesign?

When planning for a website redesign, it is very important not to neglect the impact of SEO on your site. Top reasons why SEO should be a priority is mentioned below:

 

Retaining Organic Traffic:
Many sites drive organic traffic. Ignoring SEO during site redesign may cause a sudden drop in this traffic. The site may also lose its ranking positions. The SEO elements like URLs, meta information and internal links are properly managed to maintain google search visibility.

 

Preventing SEO Issues:

A redesign if not done properly can spoil years of SEO work . Broken links, low domain authority and poor site speed, user interaction can emerge from a poorly planned redesign.

 

Protecting Search Rankings:

Search engines rank websites based on factors such as site structure, keyword relevance, and content organization. Altering URLs, content, or layout without proper planning can confuse search engines, leading to a loss in rankings. Ensuring proper redirects and keeping optimized content can help prevent this.

 

Maximizing New SEO Opportunities: 
Redesign also offers a great chance to improve SEO by focusing on the aspects like mobile-friendliness, faster load times and also good user experience. 

Redesigning your website involves not only the visual updates. You can maintain and improve your search engine rankings and attract the traffic to your site by following the proper SEO process.

 

Website Redesign SEO checklist:


A website redesign is an important opportunity to improve your site's performance and maintain or enhance SEO rankings:


1. Analyze Your Current Site and Content

Firstly analyze the content and the current performance of the site before making any changes. Use tools like Google analytics and SEMrush to analyze the site.


Bounce Rate:
Analyze how engaging your site pages are. A high bounce rate indicates the irrelevant content or poor user experience.


Time on Site:
Determine how long users stay on your site. Longer times indicate better engagement.


Domain Authority (DA):
A high DA indicates a strong SEO presence. You can check this with tools like Moz or Ahrefs.


Keyword Rankings:
Identify the important keywords that are ranking well and prioritize those keywords during website redesign.


Unique Visitors:

Analyze the volume of unique visitors from time to time to see any trends.

 

2. Prioritize the high performing content:


Prioritizing and preserving your good performing content is the important step during the website redesign process to maintain a strong SEO performance.

Always identify the high quality content in your web pages that generate good organic traffic and have notable google rankings.

Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console which shows which page drives most traffic and also which keyword attracts specific visitors.

These high-performing pages are vital not just for their role in driving traffic but also because they carry a lot of SEO weight. If you remove or alter pages with many inbound links, it can affect your site structure and weaken your SEO, thereby impacting rankings and traffic. Once you've identified your top-performing pages, it's very important to minimize the changes during the redesign to avoid any high loss of SEO value. By carefully maintaining these critical pages, you can ensure that your site continues to perform well also after redesign and protect your hard-earned search engine rankings.

 

3. Don’t forget 301 redirects:


One of the most important aspects of a website redesign is setting up 301 redirects, which is crucial for maintaining your site’s SEO performance. During a redesign, you will encounter some old or irrelevant pages that are no longer important and do not drive any traffic. Instead of updating these pages, it is more efficient to delete or redirect them. Pages with no backlinks and minimal traffic can be safely deleted without affecting your SEO. However, if a page has backlinks, removing it will break those links, which can harm your site’s authority. In such cases, setting up a 301 redirect is essential to preserve the value of those backlinks by pointing them to a relevant, updated page. Additionally, if you change your URL structure during the redesign—such as moving from HTTP to HTTPS—it’s very important to set up 301 redirects to guide visitors and search engines to the correct pages. This ensures that users are directed to relevant content without encountering errors or outdated pages, helping you maintain your website traffic. 
 

4. Optimize your page speed:

Optimizing the page speed is one of the most important factors for both SEO and User experience. Site speed has a direct impact on your search engine rankings. Slow loading pages often lead to higher bounce rates. So consider site speed as one of the redesign SEO checklists. Always make sure you avoid large media files , particularly images and videos. Compressing these large files can improve the site’s speed. Also remove unnecessary code and large source codes from your site which thereby improves site speed to a great extent. Monitoring page speed is equally important. Use tools like Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights to track your site’s performance and correct any issues. 

 

5. Update your Sitemap.xml file:

After the completion of the website redesign, updating your sitemap.xml file is a mandatory step. It helps search engines understand the new site structure and makes navigation easy. XML sitemap acts as a blueprint of your website. It shows how pages are interconnected with each other in your website. After the page removal or 301 redirects in your site, it is very important to update your sitemap.xml file to reflect the changes made. Submitting the updated XML sitemap to Google and other search engines ensures they can quickly discover and index your redesigned pages, improving the chances of your content being properly crawled and ranked. This step is especially important when URL structures have been modified. An accurate sitemap helps prevent indexing issues and ensures that your updated content is accessible to both users and search engines.Regularly update your XML sitemap which supports your SEO. 

 

6. Test your new redesigned website:

Test your redesigned site completely to know whether your site performs well. During the testing phase, go through each page in detail to know if there are any issues and rectify them. Check whether the design is consistent, and ensure that all pages, navigation links, buttons, forms, and interactive elements work well. After the site is live, it’s also important to run a fresh SEO audit to verify that all the SEO strategies implemented during the redesign are functioning as expected. A complete test ensures that your new site not only looks great but also performs optimally for both users and search engines.


7. Always have a look at your analytics:

After your new site is launched , it is very essential to continuously  monitor your site for its performance through analytics. A successful website redesign should lead to improved metrics. Focus on performance indicators such as organic traffic, bounce rate, conversions, and search engine rankings. Regularly reviewing these metrics will help you check whether the redesign helps you achieve the expected results or not.