The digital marketing industry is evolving at a breakneck pace; practically every digital campaign to raise awareness or encourage a specific action is directed to a website. Regardless of your business’s product or service, an outdated website might cost you customers. Because websites make the initial impression, if they don’t earn people’s trust, they won’t convert. Furthermore, a poorly redesigned website might obstruct search engine optimization by reducing visitors, resulting in a loss of revenue for the company.
To stay ahead of the competition, it’s critical to keep up with the current website design trends. Below are a few ways that might help you redesign your website appropriately:
1. Backup the old website
The first step is to create a backup of the website you intend to redesign. Redesigning necessitates a plethora of changes. As a result, keeping a backup of your theme files and database, add-ons, and data is always a good idea, and you can mitigate the negative effects of your website’s ranking being dropped. If something were to go wrong, you could easily revert to the prior version of the website. Creating a backup is also straightforward thanks to various Google plugins available as free tools.
2. Audit the old website
Before actually redesigning or upgrading a website, conduct an SEO website analysis of the existing site to determine which elements need to be improved, which should be left intact, and what may be eliminated. As you revamp your website, this may be seen as your approach to greater SEO rankings.
3. No-index Test Site
Robots.txt is a text file in your website’s root or main directory. It instructs SEO spiders on which portions of your website they are allowed to explore and which they are not. There’s a possibility that your robot.txt file will get corrupted during the website redesign. You may use the “robot.txt” option under crawl to see whether it has. An explicit link to your updated website’s sitemap can be included in your robots.txt file. By doing this, you’re making crawling and indexing as easy as possible for search engines by inserting your new sitemap in the robots.txt file.
Alternatively, for your pages to rank in search engines, ensuring their accessibility in the process of SEO website design, you can use no-index tags. These tags instruct Google to disregard a page completely and thus wipe out its ranking ability, so they’re not something you want to leave on the page.
4. Make the changes
Once you’ve ensured that your website no longer contains any no-index tags, you can change it without jeopardizing your SEO ranking. Changes can be done in any context, such as building a strong backlink profile or altering your current navigation arrangement. You may also hire a digital marketing agency to help you avoid problems and revamp your website ahead of time.
5. Crawl test your site
Giving your recently redesigned website a test run can help you ensure that all potential errors, redesigns, and modifications are thoroughly tested before it goes live for the ultimate user. Any company can ensure that the web-based system runs effectively and can be accepted by real-time users by undertaking website testing once it has been redesigned.
6. Optimize the new site
If your present site is optimized correctly and ranks high in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), you need to consider how to rebuild your site to be ranked higher. In the updated website, you must place a strong emphasis on optimizing the following:
- Examine all aspects of on-page SEO, such as titles and headings, meta descriptions, etc.
- Compare the new website’s page speed and ranks against the old one.
- To accomplish semantic content optimization, ensure your material is focused on a particular term and its variations.
7. Configure the redirects
When users and search engines attempt to access a page that has been relocated or removed, redirects help send them to the right page. As a result, your SEO will be impacted if you move some pages to new URLs, and at the same time, you cannot undermine your existing page’s SEO performance. Performance marketing agencies can help you enhance your page’s efficiency better.
A 301 redirect is required to resolve this issue if you want to erase the old page and redirect it to a new URL. In addition, a 301 redirect informs search engines that the URL change is permanent. The majority of the SEO values from the previous page will be carried over to the new website.
8. Remove the no-index tags
When you’re satisfied with your newly redesigned website, double-check that all no-index tags have been deleted. This can be done by removing the code from the website’s head section. Often these tags are from a template or a theme that has been utilized on the site or forgotten to be removed when it moves from design and testing to live usage. Ensuring that the website doesn’t contain no-index tags will help guarantee that your redesign process has successfully resulted in an SEO-friendly website.
Conclusion
Brands frequently engage in the common practice of website redesign to increase their ranking and visibility and target the right audience. When considering a website redesign, you must carefully plan and prioritize your efforts, as this process will directly influence your online visibility, brand reputation, and profitability. You must critically analyze the assets you intend to use, the areas that require development, and the objectives you wish to achieve.
When it comes to website redesigning or migration, paying particular attention to design and the latest plug-ins can often detract from the SEO component, which is what you need to avoid. You may get experienced services from digital marketing agencies in Mumbai that can provide you with the website of your dreams without compromising your SEO rankings.
