How can I redesign a website without losing SEO traffic?

You’re thinking about redesigning your website and are worried you might lose the traffic you’ve worked so hard for.

No worries.

If you implement an efficient SEO strategy for your website redesign, you won’t lose a single visitor. In fact, website redesign will increase traffic, rankings, and conversion rates – and your website will always stay one step ahead of your competitors’ websites.

Connection between SEO and web redesign?

There are two types of website redesign. They can be done individually or simultaneously.

Structural redesign

They change the structure of the website. They add or remove categories, create pages and subpages, and change the slug entries and the general hierarchy of the website.

This website redesign is intended to improve SEO and make it easier for crawlers to scan each web page.

Graphic redesign

They change the graphics and look of the website. There are no changes to the website’s URLs and sitemap. Only the images and text change.

The goal of this website redesign is to improve the user experience and increase the conversion rate.

Whether you should focus on SEO when redesigning a website depends on:

Structural redesign with SEO would have a long-term impact on the website. If the website already has a lot of traffic, you need to consider SEO.

How to redesign a website without losing SEO traffic?

Redesign involves changing several elements including code and pages, and if not handled properly, it can affect the SEO of the site and all your work can be lost.

Here are 10 steps to ensure you redesign your website without losing a single visitor:

1. Inventory of existing websites
2. Identify pages with high traffic
3. Implement the design on a test website
4. Test the new website for broken links
5. Perform a 301 redirect
6. Moving to the new website
7. Test run of analysis and monitoring tools
8. Robots.txt
9. Sitemap submission
10. Monitor SEO changes

#01 Inventory of existing websites

The first step is to put together all the pages of your website. This can be done in a number of ways.

#01.1 Use a website crawler:

There are many website crawlers. The crawling bots scan the website and find all the web pages.

I used SEO PowerSuite Website Auditor to find all the pages of a WPSchool website. From there you can also export all the pages.

#01.2 Using the sitemap:

If your website is already optimized for SEO, it must have a sitemap.

Add sitemap.xml to your domain to find out.

The sitemap of ServerGuy shows 274 posts.

However, some CMS make it difficult to export the URLs from the sitemap. However, if your CMS allows it, you can get an accurate list of all web pages.

#01.3 Google SERP

For smaller websites, typing “site:yoursite.com” into the Google search bar will give you results for every single one of your pages that Google currently has.

This is not practical for large websites because they have many pages and you cannot browse the search results pages.

This method will only give you the pages of the website that Google has enabled to display in search results. There would still be many pages on the website that do not appear on the Google page.

#01.4 Search Console

You can export a relatively complete list of website pages from Google Search Console.

1. Sign in to Search Console
2. To the search results report
3. Filter by pages
4. Extend the period to the maximum

You can export the list to a CSV file using the button at the top right.

#02 Identify high traffic pages

In the first step we try to extract all web pages. But this is not necessary.

If you check your analytics, you will see that only a few pages are getting a lot of traffic. Most of the pages on the site are not getting any significant traffic.

In some ways, you can ignore them. It all depends on the website traffic and its size. However, ignoring the web pages that don’t resonate is a viable solution.

If your website is not getting traffic from Google, you can even ignore SEO. It would be better to start fresh after redesigning the website.

#03 Implement the design on a test website

It is not advisable to make changes directly on the website. Your visitors would be exposed to incomplete pages, broken links, placeholder images, unedited website texts and insecure forms.

You can duplicate your current website to a temporary URL while you work on the new one. Once the site redesign is complete, you can swap out the domain and everything will work as intended.

There are some technical requirements to make this work, but your hosting company should be able to advise you or set this up for you.

At ServerGuy, website staging is included in every web hosting plan.

Do all the design on the staging site and do not index the staging site so it will not show up on Google.

#04 Testing the staging

You’ve added content to your test page and it looks great. The site redesign is complete.

Now you should check the website on stage for the following:

#05 Make a 301 redirect

The most important step is to set up 301 redirects between the old and new URL.

For example, suppose your previous website had an “About Us” page with the URL “www.yoursite.com/aboutus.html. If you now change /aboutus to /about-us, you will need to perform a 301 redirect from /aboutus to /about-us.

If you don’t do this, the /about-us page will have a 404 error. All the websites that provide the link to the /aboutus page will report a 404 link and remove your page from their website. You will lose the backlinks and also the website traffic.

Even your internal links will be broken.

Note: Many people forget to redirect image links. This causes the images to break and your website to lose link value.

If you also change the domain name, you must not let the old domain name expire. You must 301 redirect the DNS to the new domain and leave the slug unchanged.

This is where you need website migration experts.

#06 Moving to the new website

As soon as the design and forwarding are in place, the conversion will take place.

The transition can be done in one go, like Semrush did, or you can do it gradually, like Amazon does.

Additionally, you can involve your users in the site redesign, as Ahrefs did.

#07 Further tests must be carried out

The published website will perform the same test that you performed on the staging.

In fact, you now need to perform further tests:

• Analysis tools work
• Search Console and GA4 code are available
• Impact of third-party scripts on website performance
• How does caching work?
• The schema is reproduced correctly
• Internal links are safe
• SSL is valid
• Are there 404 hits on your website?
• Page break during migration
• and much more…

Create a sheet and a checklist. Perform the tests twice.

#08 Robots.txt

New URL slugs and new domain name?

You need a new robots.txt file. Most likely the old robot.txt file is corrupted.

In addition, you may need to structure your website so that there are parts of the site that you want to show or hide from crawlers.

#09 Sitemap submission

Finally, it’s time to submit the new sitemap.

Once the sitemap is submitted to Search Console, Google will crawl the site over the next few hours or days (depending on the size of the site).

New errors and possible improvements may be displayed.

#10 Monitor SEO changes

I hope you are using a rank tracker. Rank tracker monitors keyword ranks and shows the history of keyword rankings.

Once the redesign is complete and the migration is done, all you have to do is monitor rankings and SEO performance.

In addition to the number of visits, you should also track conversion rates, speed metrics, 404 hits, and other important metrics that determine the impact of website design.

Final conclusion

If you only change the visual design, it will not affect the SEO of the website, but the conversion rate will be affected positively or negatively.

But your keywords might go up or down when you create structural designs. If you follow SEO best practices, your ranking will improve.

While it may take a little effort, you won’t regret implementing search engine optimization when redesigning your website. Follow the steps in this article to redesign your website while protecting your SEO, and watch your site grow.