Website Redesign or Website Reimplementation as they call it is the complete overhaul or repairment of the code and presentation of any website. You can think of it as some kind of renovation to the website. While redesigning your website can bring you ample benefits like improved brand image and conversions, it can also cause a significant trickle in your traffic.
Website relaunch can at times, cost you your site traffic and a setback if you do not work as per well-planned SEO strategies. It may sound insignificant to keep Search Engine Optimization in mind cause’ website redesign is more about coding than anything else. But, much to our surprise, SEO plays a very crucial role in recovering your SERP rankings and traffic after the website redesign. To people out there struggling to keep up their traffic after the relaunch, we have your back. We will help you retain your site traffic after a website redesign. So, without much ado, let’s get to it.
Significance of Website Redesign/Reimplement
To renovate your website with new features, services, and products, you need to redesign and relaunch your website. The prominent reasons for website redesign include:
- You need to move ahead of time to avoid embarrassment (boring and unfriendly website).
- Your website no longer reflects your brand (updated services/products/features).
- The website fails to match new design trends.
- Non-responsive and non-friendly website no longer appeals to the audience.
- Slow-site speed annoys users like no other thing.
- Unoptimized website (not optimized as per the search engines and latest algorithms.
It is extremely great that your website is bringing in lots of business and profits, but to achieve long-term success, you will have to explore and maximize the opportunities. Relaunching your website with a new design can bring before you these opportunities.
What You Can do to Recover your Website Traffic?
The very basic requirement to retain website traffic post its relaunch is an SEO minded designer, a not-so-easily-found rarity. The website developers who are concerned more about updating the HTML codes and other things, often end up ignoring SEO. This arises the need to curate the right web design agency. Although to some extent, hiring a savvy website developer may not completely save your traffic from rippling after reimplementation.
So, the best way is to keep the following things in mind while redesigning your website. We suggest you do a thorough check before launching the same. Irrespective of whatsoever problem you come across, the rule remains the same. You are first, supposed to analyze the problem followed by locating a solution to the same. That’s exactly what we shall do to recover your SEO rankings and traffic after website redesign too.
Firstly, Analyze the Problems
- Gather Information about Errors/Issues
To identify the exact cause of trickle in your website traffic, you will need certain information like Google Analytics, Date of Relaunch, Website URL (historic/alternative URLs too) besides historic KW rankings, if available.
- Confirm the Issues (Review the Traffic Drop)
To confirm the time and speed of the rippling traffic, you are to use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You will also have to review the traffic drop on a day-to-day basis to analyze if there is some pattern in the rippling traffic.
- Take a Detailed Look at the Issues
Take a detailed look at the dropping sequence of your website. If the organic traffic drops while the paid traffic (traffic from other channels) remains unchanged, website design has the issue.
- Determine the Losses
Before working on the ways to recovery, we suggest you identify the most-affected pages. Google Analytics will help you compare the traffic of landing pages before and after the relaunch. Make sure that all of your landing pages have content. Traffic doesn’t come on the blank landing pages.
If your landing pages have quality content, but you still do not receive website traffic as before, there must become a technical issue.
- Shortlist Your Issues
Now that you have analyzed your website for the issues and the errors, shortlist them so that you do not forget or miss them will eradicating them.
- Secondly, Find and Implement Adequate Solutions to the Problems/Issues (Common Problems)
Numerous aspects cause traffic drop and each of them needs a distinct approach to be solved. We have listed below some of the most common suspects of traffic drop along with their solutions.
- Blank or Misconfigured Redirects/Page Errors
It is ideally recommended against changing the URLs to redirect from old to new landing pages after a website relaunch. You can visit the URLs of the most-visited pages from the previous website on the web browser and check the same. If the URL has some issue after the relaunch, you haven’t done this part well.
- Missing Pages
All the content (from the previous website) that has high traffic volume should necessarily be present on the new website. If your visitor looks up for a certain page and receives error 404, your website traffic drop cannot be helped.
- Changed Contents
Websites are often seen with updated/changed contents once they undergo redesigning. While at times, this could be great it could also be a gateway trickling website traffic.
You can always improve the content but do not change the things (webpage content) that performed well previously. Use web archive to understand if the new improved content is better or the previous one.
- Domain Issues
Website redesign brings in disguise the changes in the domain. It makes changes to the protocols (HTTPS), domains (Xyz), and subdomains (www). Ensure that your redirects account for these changes too if, your new website uses a different domain.
- Technical Optimization
There may be a possibility that you have done all things correctly but the traffic would still not come. It could be due to certain problems in technical optimization (canonical URLs, crawl issues, indexation, etc). Perform SEO and website audits to ensure proper technical optimization.
Bottom Line
Redesigning a website is both rewarding and challenging. The end goal is to come out as a trendy and user-friendly website that could suffice the queries of the visitors. Ignoring Search Engine Optimization or any other factor could cost you years of your previous hard work. So, do not rush to relaunch the website. Take proper time. Analyze the shortfalls, find the solutions and come out as a better website
Source – https://seodigitalgurus.com/recover-seo-rankings-and-traffic-after-website-redesign/
Emma Watson 