Unlock the benefits of a website redesign with this comprehensive guide.
Learn the importance of staying up-to-date with design trends, how to assess the need for a redesign, and the critical steps to a successful relaunch, including SEO considerations.
Get ready for a fresh look, better performance, and a more enjoyable user experience. Read on to take your website to the next level.
Let’s get started.
What Is a Website Redesign?
A website redesign entails extensive modifications to the website. During the redesign process, components such as the code, content, structure, and visual elements may undergo significant alterations, resulting in a refreshed appearance for the site.
It is imperative to keep up with the ever-evolving web design landscape. Even if a website was considered to be the best in its time, it may now appear outdated if it has not undergone any significant changes. An example of this is the comparison between the New York Times website from the early 2000s and its current iteration.
This example proves that your website has to change with the times. As design trends evolve, technology improves, and your audience’s expectations shift, you need to keep up.
Sometimes it’s just a quick refresh, but sometimes a full redesign is needed. Just make sure you’re following the latest best practices so your SEO stays intact during the process.
What a Website Redesign Can Do for You?
Redesigning a website can be a bit nerve-wracking, especially when it comes to how it could impact your website’s SEO. But when it’s done right, the rewards are huge!
Here are some of the things you could expect:
- Better SEO.
- Faster website performance.
- A more enjoyable user experience.
- A clearer direction for your content.
- A fresh new look for your site, and better security.
Think of your website as the digital face of your business, and you want it to be eye-catching and appealing to your audience.
This could mean a higher conversion rate, fewer people bouncing off your site, more time spent on your page, and better SEO results.
How to Know if The Time Has Come to Redesign the Website?
To determine if it’s necessary to make modifications to your website, it’s recommended to assess the site from the perspective of your target audience. By conducting a thorough evaluation and asking the following questions:
- Does the brand representation align with your goals and objectives?
- Is the page loading speed optimal?
- Is the site structure organized in a logical and intuitive manner for navigation?
- Are the pages optimized for mobile devices?
- Is it effortless for visitors to access the desired information?
- Is the customer experience streamlined and efficient?
By benchmarking your website against your competitors, you can identify areas for improvement.
In the event that your site exhibits strong performance in some aspects but is lacking in others, a website refresh may be appropriate.
Conversely, if there are multiple areas that require significant improvement, it may be necessary to undertake a comprehensive redesign of the site.
Website Redesign SEO Checklist
Undertaking a website redesign or migration requires a strategic approach to ensure its success. Implementing an SEO checklist is critical to prevent unfavorable outcomes and maximize business outcomes.
This checklist will provide a comprehensive guide to prioritize SEO during the pre-launch and post-launch phases.
Review Your Redesign Goals
What are your goals for redoing your website? You want to make sure you keep all the hard work you’ve put in to build it up, including your search engine rankings, links, and traffic. And of course, you want to make it better too!
So what are the reasons for your redesign? Maybe it’s to improve your business, give your visitors a better experience, support your marketing campaigns, or improve your SEO. Whatever it is, it’s important to set clear goals so you can measure your success.
Make sure you have a good starting point and standards to compare to, so you can see how much your website has improved after the redesign.
Optimize Your Website’s Key Elements
As we delve further into our website’s page-level content, it’s essential to keep a keen eye on its relevance to our target audience.
Think of your website as a map, with each page being a different location. Your goal is to make sure that the content on each page accurately represents the location and provides the information that your visitors are searching for.
To achieve this, it’s crucial to understand the changes to the layout and structure of your website.
This includes changes to the overall architecture and sitemap, which will dictate how much attention you need to pay to maintaining the relevance of your content.
It’s important to optimize your website’s key elements such as URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, body copy, and alt text, to ensure that your visitors can easily navigate your website and find what they’re looking for.
Think of optimizing your website before launch as a tune-up for your website’s engine. By taking the time to make these updates, you’ll avoid any potential roadblocks and ensure that your website runs smoothly and effectively.
301 redirects
When redesigning your website, you want to make sure that users have a good experience. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- For pages being redirected and those being removed, map out 301 redirects.
- Avoid 404 error pages as much as possible.
- Redirect all pages that have links pointing to them, especially if you don’t have control over updating the links.
- Use your earlier crawl for sitemap planning to find all the URLs that need redirecting.
- Check Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console to make sure you don’t miss any redirects.
- Make sure all redirects are implemented before the launch. If you wait until after launch, it will be harder to fix and you’ll miss opportunities.
Remember, the goal is to have a website that is easy to use and helps your users find what they’re looking for.
By planning ahead and making sure all your redirects are in place, you’ll help make this happen.
At the time of launch, it is advisable to closely follow the go-live checklist and conduct any necessary quality control assessments on the work completed on the staging site to date.
The launch should not proceed if any redirects or on-page work have not undergone testing.
It is more prudent to temporarily defer the launch rather than having to rectify issues post-launch or, even more detrimental, revert to the previous website.
After the Update Do a Site Review
Check Redirects. Make sure all your old URLs are 301 redirected to your new site by reviewing your redirect file, old sitemap, and old site crawl.
Make sure all your old URLs redirect properly to your new site with 301 redirects.
This will help you find any broken links and fix them quickly.
Just quickly check a few URLs first, and then go more in-depth as you have time.
And keep an eye out for any sneaky redirects like 302s to make sure your redirects are clean.
It is also imperative to ensure the transfer of all optimized web pages and specific on-page elements from the development site to the live site.
This is particularly relevant for websites that feature a substantial amount of dynamic content, as it is a common occurrence for databases and tables to be omitted during the migration process.
As an example, if the title tags were optimized on the staging site, but their database was not made live at launch, the outcome may be missing or default duplicate titles across pages, including product pages.
Code & Performance Validation
You shouldn’t assume that the live site will work the same as the test site.
Use a mobile-friendly tool or Lighthouse audit to ensure the homepage and important pages are mobile-friendly.
Check the new site’s page speed for any improvements. There may be issues on the live site that didn’t appear on the test site due to things like servers and hosting.
Make sure your site’s schema markup is correct and that everything is set up correctly, especially if anything has changed between the old, test, and live sites.
Submit XML Sitemaps
Having double-checked that your redirects are working perfectly and that all the SEO stuff is set up on the live site, it’s time to send in the XML sitemap.
Ensure that all URLs you want to include are included in the dynamic sitemap.
If You can generate a new static sitemap, give it a quick check, and then submit it.
Ensure your XML sitemap files are error-free. It is important that no URLs lead to 404 errors, and all URLs should be the final destination, not redirects or other versions.
Review
Completion of the extensive SEO efforts involved in the relaunch and migration process is a significant accomplishment.
Now is the time to transition to a monitoring phase. If you notice any 404 errors, crawl errors, or HTML on-page issues over time, closely follow the Google Search Console and the Bing Webmaster Tools.
Prioritizing the resolution of these issues is essential.
SEO is an ongoing process, not just a one-time fix. After the new site is up and running, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate its performance.
This way, you can make sure you’re on track and keep optimizing as needed.