A good website redesign can really transform a business, remedying technical issues, making branding more distinctive and growing revenue as a result. However, there is an important caveat. It must be done with careful consideration for your SEO.
If you’re not sure about how to handle your website redesign SEO, don’t fret because we’re here to help. Read this guide to find out how you can plan your redesign to protect rankings, and if you need additional support, be sure to contact our team.
Phase 1: Pre-launch auditing
Good preparation is half the battle won. By carefully auditing your site before you launch your redesign, you can avoid issues that can impact your ranking post-launch, protecting you from revenue losses and additional work for your team. Let’s go through all the tasks you need to tick off to complete this phase.
1. Crawl your current site
First, you need a record of all the URLs that currently exist on your website. Use a crawling tool like ScreamingFrog or Sitebulb to do this, and export a file containing all of your live pages.
From there, you can document your site’s current structure and map out how your pages currently relate to each other.
2. Identify important pages
To make sure you don’t remove any valuable content from your site, extract data from SEO tools like GA4 and Google Search Console and track which of your pages bring in the most traffic, conversions, and backlinks.
It is helpful to keep all of this data in a spreadsheet and use a VLOOKUP formula to quickly map your data to the pages from your crawl.
Important: Note that there may be some pages on your site that don’t bring in a huge amount of traffic, but are still crucial to your business. Examples of this may be About, Careers, and Case Study pages that don’t get a lot of visits but need to be kept to signal your authority.
Once you’ve collected your data, mark each of your pages on a scale, from what’s crucial to keep, to medium-priority pages, and ones that can be removed.
3. Log current performance
For peace of mind as well as clarity on what your steps should be post-migration, it’s a good idea to keep a record of your current keyword rankings, conversion rates, and core web vitals. After the website redesign is complete, you can compare performance post-launch to find out if the transition has gone smoothly and if there are any pages that need to be optimised.
Important: Remember that it is normal for a website to see a brief drop in performance after a migration while your site is being re-crawled, so wait until you are certain the new site has been fully indexed before comparing your performance.
Phase 2: Mapping your new website
Once you’ve collected all of your data, you can map out your new site structure and identify opportunities to rewrite or prune content.
1. Create your new taxonomy
If your site structure is being refreshed, you will need to create a new website taxonomy to clarify where content should sit. You can use either a spreadsheet or a visual tool like Figma to map out how your new site structure should look. Make sure that this is well-organised so that folder depth and URL changes are clear to anyone working on the re-structure.
2. Create a redirect map
A poorly done redirect map is a common pitfall of website redesign SEO. Let’s say that you have a well-performing page bringing in thousands of sessions each month, and suddenly it is redirected to the homepage or lost entirely. This can cost you valuable rankings and conversions.
Hence why a 301 redirect map should never be rushed and always carefully reviewed before it is submitted.
To create your redirect map, list out all live pages on your site, mark if they are being redirected, and state the most relevant page that they can be redirected to. Keep an eye out for any redirect chains that exist on your current site, and make sure that these are amended to point to one redirect URL.
Important: When you redirect a URL to a relevant page, its PageRank is transferred to the new URL, which means that your rankings, backlinks, and authority can be passed on. For this reason, avoid simply redirecting removed pages to the homepage, as this can hurt performance and possibly lead to a soft 404.
3. Map out content changes
When you look at your performance data, you may find that there are some pages that are under-performing. Perhaps you have some old blogs that aren’t bringing in traffic anymore, or service pages that you need to keep on your site but aren’t ranking well for target keywords. You may also want to change the wording on certain pages due to rebranding. It is good practice for website migration SEO to identify these pages so that you can reap maximum rewards from the redesign.
Record the primary keywords for pages you want to optimise, and make a content plan for any pages you need to rewrite.
In this step you should also map out any new URLs that will be added to your taxonomy and identify which keywords you need to target to write content for them.
Phase 3: The staging environment
Website redesign SEO work doesn’t end when you get to staging. There are a few important considerations when you get to this stage to make sure your SEO website migration goes smoothly.
1. No-index the staging site
It may seem obvious, but we can’t talk about the staging environment without stressing the importance of no-indexing the staging site. Use disallow in your robots.txt file or a noindex tag to make sure that Google does not index the site before it’s ready. Skipping this step will lead to duplicate content and potential discovery from users that will damage your credibility.
2. Audit the new site structure
Once you have implemented the site structure changes for your website redesign on the staging site, you can do some testing to make sure everything is working as it should. Audit for any broken internal links, ensure that pages are in the correct subfolders, and check that the navigation is crawlable (no reliance on JavaScript). This phase is also a good opportunity to assess core web vitals on the new site to make sure that your site is fast and responsive once it is pushed live.
Phase 4: launch day
If you have been cautious in your approach to website redesign SEO so far, when it comes to launch day your site should be in a good place to become public and sow the seeds for organic growth. There are just a few things to keep in mind to make sure that this day goes smoothly:
- Make sure noindex tags are switched off and robots.txt is updated to allow the site to be crawled.
- Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console, but still keep your old sitemap active for a few weeks so that crawlers can find 301 redirects quickly.
- Ensure that the new site is secure with a HTTPS protocol.
Phase 5: Post-launch audit
You’ve finally made it. Your new site is live and you can finally reap the rewards of your website redesign SEO efforts. Now all that’s left to do is a final audit to make sure that no issues have been missed and some performance monitoring to check that the migration is doing what it should.
Re-crawl the site and check for issues
Just as we did in Phase 1, use an SEO tool to re-crawl the site and check for any issues or warnings that are left to fix. Keep an eye out for any broken internal links that may have been missed in the staging environment, any new pages in your taxonomy that haven’t been added, lorem ipsum content that hasn’t been updated, and indexing issues.
Verify your redirect map
Go back to your redirect map and check that each redirected URL is now pointing to the correct page. Also check for any redirect chains or loops that need to be updated.
Explore the new site manually
Aside from testing issues through a tool like ScreamingFrog, it is also a good idea to click around the new site to make sure there is no content locked behind JavaScript, the site is loading quickly, there are no repetitive pop-ups, and content is easily accessible on both desktop and mobile.
Track indexation status
Use the Indexing report in Google Search Console so monitor how quickly new pages are being indexed and replacing the old ones.
Monitor performance
Track your rankings, traffic, and conversions over the next few months to see how the migration has affected performance. Remember that it is normal to see a performance drop in the initial stage, but this should return to normal and then above previous levels once the new site is fully indexed and evaluated.
If some pages are not performing as well as you expected, investigate possible technical issues and consider optimising content to get better results. Make sure that you have a strong internal linking strategy and navigation so that users can easily discover all content on your site.
Conclusion
I hope that this guide has proven useful and will help you to avoid the pitfalls that can make a website redesign turn sour. SEO in website migrations is a long and sometimes complex process, but it is worth it to protect your rankings and performance.
If you are currently considering a website redesign, we have a team of expert web designers and SEOs that can help. Contact our team today and we’ll be happy to help.
