Many businesses opt for a website redesign to improve their site traffic and conversions. A website redesign can help you change your website’s appearance, loading speed, and user experience. However, a website redesign can also risk your existing conversions and site traffic if not done correctly. Knowing how the changes affect your website and preparing ahead can ensure a smooth website redesign.
It would be best to keep in mind a few things when redesigning your website:
Analyse Your Website
When redesigning your website, the first thing you need to do is analyse your existing website. You need to check various KPIs for your websites, such as rankings for your keywords, bounce rates, domain authority, and conversions. Doing so will help you identify what’s not working so you can make changes to your website while redesigning.
Analyse Your Existing Content
While analysing your website, you need to jot down those web pages and content with the most engagement. Engagement can be determined by the number of likes, shares, comments, page views, and clicks. You need to ensure that these pages are protected during website redesign so you can get engagement from them after redesign too.
Set Your SEO Goals
The next step is to ascertain your SEO goals so you can align changes in your website to reach them. You want to increase your website traffic by 20% and notice that the traffic is low due to slow loading speed. So it would be best if you made changes to your website to increase the loading speed. Setting SEO goals helps you create a new website suited for your overall marketing strategy.
Optimize Your Existing Content
If you have a website running for over a year, you will have a lot of content on your site. Scrapping it all during a redesign is a waste of effort and money. You can optimize the existing content to make it better for your redesigned website.
Implement on-page SEO tactics like removing duplicate content adding keywords to titles, subheadings, URLs, Alt Tags, and content body to optimize your content. You can also add internal links to your website content to increase traffic to other pages.
Set up 301 Redirects
When you perform your site audit, you will come across pages that add no real value to your website. You can remove these pages during your redesign to improve your website crawling. If you are worried about losing the backlinks on these pages, you can easily add site redirects to updated pages. You should also use site redirects if you are changing the URL structure of your website to prevent losing any traffic due to redesigning.
Update Your Site Architecture and XML Sitemap
Once you have removed the pages and added new content, you need to update the architecture so your visitors can navigate your website easily. The architecture determines how your website will look and where users can find what they are looking for. An XML sitemap does the same thing for search engines and makes it easier for them to crawl your website. So you need to update both to get more traffic.
About the Author
We at Planet Web Solutions a leading custom ecommerce development agency, aim at harnessing our true potentials towards delivering the best online experience to our clientele.
