If your business has a website, you’ll likely need to redesign or upgrade it at some point to keep it looking modern and working well. However, making changes to your website can seriously impact how easily people find it through search engines like Google if you’re not careful. This is called search engine optimisation (SEO). Check our beginners guide to seo to learn more.
Imagine your website is like a shop on the baker street in London. Good SEO helps people walking by easily see your shop sign, browse your window displays, and decide to come inside. If you redesign your shop interior without thinking about the outside too, people may struggle to find you or think you’ve closed down for good! That’s why preserving and prioritising your SEO is absolutely critical during any website redesign or overhaul.
Why SEO Should Be Your Top Priority in Website Redesign
Why Does SEO Matter So Much for Website Redesign?
When ranking websites in their search results, engines like Google look at crucial technical elements like the website address (URL) structure, how quickly pages load, whether the site is mobile friendly, and if it’s secure using HTTPS encryption. If any of these core factors change during a redesign without proper planning and implementation, your search rankings could take a nosedive. That means far fewer potential customers finding and visiting your website.
For example, let’s say your current website has the URL www.myshop.co.uk/toys for your toys section. If in the redesign you change that to www.myshop.co.uk/products/toys without setting up URL redirects correctly, Google may think the old page has been completely removed or deleted rather than just updated. You need to let Google know where the new location is through redirects.
What to Do Before Starting a Website Redesign
Before even thinking about making website redesign or structure changes, you need to thoroughly analyse and document your current website’s full SEO performance and set-up. This will help identify what’s already working well that needs to be preserved, and what issues need to be fixed in the redesign:
- Use website crawler tools to scan your full site for any existing SEO problems like broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, missing meta info and more
- Identify your current most popular and highest trafficked pages that are already getting found in searches
- Document and map out details like your full URL structure, website navigation links and menus, page titles/descriptions and more
- Doing this full SEO audit upfront accomplishes two key things. First, it creates a roadmap to proactively fix any SEO issues during the redesign rather than letting them linger. Second, it establishes baselines to accurately measure whether your redesign improves or unintentionally harms your overall search performance.
SEO Best Practices for Planning a Website Redesign
URL Structure
Try to keep your website’s URL structure and page addresses the same if at all possible, as changing URLs requires implementing redirects mapping the old URLs to the new ones. If you absolutely must change URL structures, make sure to properly set up 301 permanent redirects for every affected URL.
Website Architecture and Navigation
The way your redesigned website is structured with different sections, categories, navigation menus and internal links is a critical factor for SEO. Your new architecture should aim to improve crawlability and navigability for users compared to your old site structure. Update your XML sitemaps accordingly.
Redirects
When changing page URLs or locations, setting up the correct redirect strategy is one of the most crucial SEO considerations. Use URL mapping tools to properly implement and validate all redirects from old URLs to the new locations before launching the redesigned site to avoid broken links.
Unsure how often should you redesign your website? Prioritize SEO in your refresh for long-term search visibility and traffic gains.
Technical SEO
Mobile Responsiveness
With mobile-first indexing, Google now prioritises mobile first web design, so ensure your redesign provides a seamless and fast mobile experience across phones and tablets
Page Load Times
A website redesign is an opportunity to address issues with slow page load times by optimising images, leveraging browser caching, reducing redirect chains and implementing other speed optimisation best practices
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
If not already, move to using HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP as Google gives preference in rankings to more secure HTTPS encrypted websites
Monitoring and Optimising Post-Launch
Once your redesigned site is successfully launched and live for users, the work isn’t over yet. It’s critical to closely monitor and measure the site’s SEO performance and impact using tools like:
- Google Analytics to track overall website traffic changes
- Google Search Console to identify any issues with URLs, sitemaps, page experience metrics etc.
- Rank tracking tools to monitor ranking positions for important keywords
- Look for any pages or sections that may have lost significant search visibility, traffic drops, new errors being reported and other potential problems. Be prepared to make adjustments to your redirection strategies, internal linking, metadata and other elements as needed to recover and optimise based on real user and performance data.
- Redesigning any website risks serious SEO disruptions and traffic loss if not handled with careful planning and execution. However, by doing your homework upfront, implementing redirection and optimisation best practices, and closely monitoring the transition, you can successfully overhaul your site while preserving – or even boosting – those valuable search rankings and visibility.
Structured Data and Semantic SEO
In addition to the technical seo, you’ll also want to optimise for semantic SEO and leverage structured data during a redesign. This helps search engines better understand the context and meaning of your website’s content.
Implement structured data markup like FAQ, HowTo, and Article schema to explicitly define different content types and elements. For the toys section example, you could use Product schema to provide details like price, availability, ratings and more.
When it comes to semantic relevance, include synonyms and related concepts naturally throughout your content. For the toys pages, this could mean using terms like “games,” “playthings,” and “kid’s products.” This confirms relevance to search engines beyond just the keyword “toys.”
Don't Neglect Content Quality
While the technical SEO elements are crucial, you also can’t neglect the quality and depth of your actual website content during a redesign. This speaks to Google EAT criteria of prioritising expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Aim to create a superior content experience compared to your previous site and competitors. This could involve:
- Expanding thin content with more detailed information and multimedia
- Ensuring content is well-researched, factual and free of errors
- Having a clear content strategy and hierarchy for the site architecture
- Including quotes, statistics and insights from authoritative third-party sources
- You may even want to perform a content audit along with the technical SEO audit pre-redesign to identify areas for improvement.
User Engagement and Visual Appeal
To maximise user engagement and make content more consumable, incorporate:
- Bulleted lists and checklists to break up text
- Corresponding images, videos or graphics
- Interactive tools where relevant
- Ample real-world examples to illustrate points
- The more visually appealing and easier to digest your content is for website visitors, the more it can improve crucial engagement metrics like average time on page.
Promotion and Link Building
Lastly, actively promote your newly redesigned website and high-quality content to continue building authority through backlinks. Encourage sharing on social media, reach out to relevant publications about featuring the content, list it in directories, and more.
You can even run an influencer or digital PR campaign to land placements and links on other authoritative websites. The goal is to show search engines that your redesigned site is a trustworthy and authoritative resource worth ranking well.
By covering all of these areas throughout the redesign process, you’ll be well-positioned to make your new website a success from both a user experience and SEO perspective.
Struggling with SEO content length for your redesigned website? Prioritizing SEO during your refresh ensures your content strategy aligns with search engine best practices. This helps you create content that users find valuable and that ranks well in search results.
How can we help you?
As a leading website design and advertising agency, UTDS Optimal Choice has extensive experience guiding clients through successful website redesigns while protecting their search engine visibility. Our team of SEO experts and web developers follow proven best practices to ensure your redesign project doesn’t disrupt your organic traffic and rankings.
We start with an in-depth SEO audit of your existing website to establish benchmarks and identify areas for improvement during the redesign process. Our SEO specialists work closely with the design team to implement an optimal URL and site architecture structure, set up proper redirects, optimise for mobile and Core Web Vitals, and more.
With UTDS Optimal Choice as your partner, you can move forward confidently with redesigning your website to meet modern user expectations, while preserving and even improving upon the SEO you’ve worked hard to build. Reach out today to learn more about our comprehensive redesign and SEO services.
