In order to enhance your website’s performance and provide better user experience, you sometimes need to redesign your page or migrate to a new CMS. Although this may sound exciting, redesigning a website also has its scary part. That is losing a hefty amount of your natural search traffic. Fortunately, there are ways that you can do to overhaul your page without compromising your SEO efforts.
Create a 301 Redirection Plan
This is the most important thing that you should do when redesigning your website. You have to 301-redirect your older pages to its new counterpart, as it will safely pass your content’s page rank. In turn, you will be able to maintain your website’s Search Equity. Failure to do this will bring your page ranking down the drain.
Analyze and Crawl Your Links
When you redesign your website, there’s a good chance its URL structures will change. That’s why it is important that you crawl and analyze your site using a site crawler tool. This will give you an idea of your website’s link profile, which tells you whether a page needs to be migrated or not. That way, you are sure to keep your content’s URL structures that are performing well.
Conduct SEO Audit and Web Performance Report
A web analytics tool is not only designed to see how your website is doing in terms of generating traffic. It can also help point out which of your content are most visited, where the traffic is coming from and where they usually land. This tells you the strengths and weaknesses of your website, as well as its risk and opportunities. As a result, you know what should be migrated and what should be left behind.
Tell Search Engines that You are Moving Domain
It’s important that you also have a webmaster tool. This will not only verify your website’s ownership, analyze diagnostics for the sites you own, view search queries and click-through data, you can also use this to inform search engines that you are moving domain. This will help you monitor whether your website’s entire migration process is doing well.
Continue Your SEO Efforts
Redesigning your website is a great way to review your current search engine optimization strategies. It is also a great way to search for potential issues like a surplus on or lack of optimization. During the overhaul process, it’s important that your new pages contain your current SEO strategies that work. Otherwise, your rankings and traffic could suffer greatly.
Redesigning your website or moving from one CMS to another is not easy as it seems. You have to do preliminary steps in order to secure your Search Equity, best-performing pages and SEO efforts. Or else, your page ranking will fall off.