The company's website serves as its online customer's first impression. It serves as your website's main sales pitch and an online business card. Just as businesses may need an effective website, redesigning an old website is just as important.
You must have a user-friendly website to engage your target audience online effectively. Additionally, for your business to expand, your website needs to be user-friendly and visually appealing. However, many website owners are hesitant to revamp their sites out of concern about their SEO.
The longer they wait to revamp their site, the older it will appear. Many businesses hire a professional web design agency in Houston to redesign their websites as they are worried about losing their SEO. They assist clients in redesigning their websites while maintaining their SEO.
Here, we've concluded a list of some important factors to consider when revamping a company website.
Ways to Redesign a Website Without Losing SEO
Below is a list of some of the most important factors to consider when revamping your website.
1. Back up Your Website Data
Before beginning a website redesign, it is wise to make a backup of your current website as a safety measure. Create regular backups of your theme files, database, plugins, and content. In this manner, you can always fall back on the earlier website version if something goes wrong. Making a backup is also easy, thanks to various free downloadable plugins from Google. Adhere to the guidelines provided by the plugin tools.
2. Set Up 301 Redirects
Your SEO will be impacted if you move some pages to new URLs. However, you wouldn't want to harm your current page's SEO performance. A 301 redirect moves traffic from an outdated URL to a new URL of your choice. Additionally, it communicates to search engines that this is a substantial change, which is crucial.
When you utilize a 301, you move the majority of the old page's SEO value to your new one, preserving it. Therefore, choosing the appropriate redirects is crucial for the SEO of your site makeover. As a result, your initial link-building investment and your website's functionality will be preserved.
3. Check for Broken Links
After completing the website change, you must check the newly created site for broken links. For example, a testing webpage may contain broken links in javascript or CSS. Even though broken links won't harm your website's SEO, inspecting them before going live is advisable.
Several free link-checking programs are accessible online. These tools can determine whether or not each link is active. Additionally, after making all the necessary adjustments and before going live, remove the site under maintenance from your website.
4. Verify and Index Your New Website on Google
The search engine crawlers for a developing site are typically stopped by developers when redesigning a website. But you need to restart the crawling of your website as soon as it is finished and prepared to go live. Verification would be the next stage after the crawling resumes. You can use the Google search console to perform a check.
The URL Inspection feature of the Google Search Console is another alternative. The new website will be read and correctly indexed by Google. You can submit the website to Google after it has been examined and found to be error-free.
5. Crawl Your Existing Website to Identify the Changes
The crawler software examines every page of your website. All the links on those pages are queued up. Then, these data are gathered and returned to Google. Crawlers can help you determine the changes made to your new website. It will offer you a general concept of how the new website is set up. You will also receive the metadata for the live website as well as the URL structure. Finally, it will assist you in reconciling the information on the old website with the new one.
6. Keep the Same Content and Structure
When acquiring your SEO data, you should consider your website's structure and content. Simply put, when altering your design, try to keep the content of your web pages as consistent as possible. The hierarchy of your site pages and the URL structure make up your site structure.
Therefore, you shouldn't change the URLs or add or remove any pages from your website. Instead, you will need to use 301 redirects if you decide to update parts of your sites or the URL structure. Although it can be challenging, using a plugin like All in One SEO can help.
Read more to learn: Benefits of Hiring Web Design Experts
7. Examine Each Landing Page on your Current Website.
It's a good idea to update the URL structure of your website, and you must notify Google of any changes. If you don't do this, your website's ranking will suffer, and fewer people will trust it. In addition, it can cause visitors to stop coming to your website. But how do you inform Google that you are updating your current website? You may easily do that by listing every URL on your website. Going to the sitemap and saving it as a text file is the simplest approach to completing the task.
8. Improve and Resubmit the XML Sitemap for Your Website
Your website's XML sitemap will have new structures if your website's URLs have changed. Send Google the updated XML sitemap. It will support Google's indexing of your website and support consistent website rankings. You still need to check your website for potential issues after the optimization and XML sitemap submissions are finished. If something isn't adequately checked, it can be revealed to be an error.
Conclusion
Without meticulous planning, rebuilding a website without harming its SEO can be quite challenging. Appropriate planning and preparation will be necessary for the redesigning process to be successful.
You now have a better understanding of how to redesign websites without losing SEO in Houston in this post. YellowFin Digital can assist you if you're looking for a web design company in Houston. With a strategic SEO approach, we have several years of expertise assisting our clients in attracting their target clients.
With the help of our Houston web design services, you can create effective, SEO-friendly websites that will attract your target market.
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