The Best Way to Redesign your Website Without Losing SEO

by Hayley Canfield January 22, 2023

Read on if you’re concerned about losing SEO rank if you change your Website Design in CT. This blog was written just for you.

Do you know about the website Plenty of Fish?

In order to learn a new coding language, the guy who built the site developed it as an exercise. He had no idea how well the business would do. Through this website, he suddenly makes $4 Million a year.

The problem he had was this.

Despite his site’s success, he had no idea why it was so successful. Basically, he got lucky. Having no idea what made the site successful in the first place, he is afraid to make any changes, so he chooses to stay the same.

A well-ranked website can feel a lot like this in many ways.

The process of getting there isn’t entirely clear to you, but you don’t want to mess things up. There’s nothing pretty about your site, but you’re getting tons of traffic because you’re ranked at the top of Google, and now you’re terrified to touch it for fear of losing your SEO rank.

Maintaining Your SEO RankWhen Doing a Website Design

How should we proceed?

Several of our clients have also reached out to us in the same situation, in need of an updated Website Design CT, but even more desperate to avoid losing their ranking in Google’s search engine results.

Whenever we update a client’s design, we make sure their SEO ranking doesn’t suffer. Here’s how we do that.

Find Out Where Your Website Stands in Terms of SEO

It is pointless to preserve your SEO ranking if you didn’t have any to begin with. In order to determine your current rankings, step one is to check them. Several methods are available for doing this. To start, you should check your Google Analytics and see which keywords are already driving traffic to your website. Search Google directly for those keywords and see where you rank.

Make a spreadsheet with your current ranking keywords for your records once you know them. Since whatever you’ve been doing up until now isn’t really working, you can skip the rest of this blog and start over from scratch.

Meta Descriptions and Link Structures Should Be Established

Next, you need to establish the current link structure for your Website Design CT. As part of the process, we take your existing sitemap and convert it into a spreadsheet. In a spreadsheet, we input all of your existing sitemap pages, including Home, About, Services, FAQ, etc… as well as their links. When you check it against the new site structure, this will be important.

As far as search indexing is concerned, keep content as close to the same as possible

The only page that qualifies for this is one that ranks very high for a given keyword on Google. The content should be left as much the same as possible in such cases. It is said that ‘If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.’ If you are already on page 1 of Google for a given search term, then just leave your content alone because doing anything will not improve your situation.

Ensure your SEO ranking isn’t hurt by this common mistake

Building a new Website Design CT usually happens on what’s known as a ‘staging site’. The purpose of this step is to ensure the site is displaying properly during the development phase. Before the site is launched, the client can make any changes that need to be made. It is common for WordPress sites on staging servers to disable search engine indexing. Your WordPress site’s Settings > Reading section contains this setting. The new website needs to be unchecked as soon as it launches. Beautiful new websites have been launched, only to lose ALL of their SEO traffic after the ‘discourage search engines’ checkbox wasn’t unchecked. Be careful not to let this happen to you.

Final thoughts about your Website Design

There you have it. Transferring your site without losing SEO ranking. Follow all the steps here closely if you’re doing this on your own. If you’re going to do this, you should probably hire a professional who specializes in Website Design CT. Either way, ensure all steps of this blog are used as a checklist.