How to keep your
SEO Rankings After
a Website Redesign

Are you working on your website redesigning? If yes then you will surely need to maintain your SEO rankings. This particular area needs more focus than almost anything else. Website redesigning can be done carefully, as this task can disrupt your online presence if it doesn't keep your SEO rankings.

No one can afford the risk of losing business information, customers and more importantly losing the SEO rankings. All these can harm your customer trust and ultimately your business growth. However, you can control your risk at a potential level with the following:

Keep your eye on everything

This is the main way to control your risk of losing SEO rankings. As you might make a mistake but don't realize it until it does massive damage. You can save your business from a great loss by monitoring everything right from start to end. By the time website redesigning plans come to your mind, also consider SEO monitoring tools. Keep your tabs on to avoid disturbance and to look at every SEO metric.

You need to monitor the following factors carefully:

• Search engine organic traffic
• Speed
• Keyword rankings
• Domain authority

• Backlinks
• Spam score
• Safety measures

Of Course, we are using the best tools that consider all of the above.

Avoid working on the live website

This is the main thing that needs to be taken into consideration when you are deciding to make changes to your website. Do not work on your website when your website is live. As visitors who visit your website will get frustrated or shift to another site. So that's why it's always recommended to disable your website before making any kind of improvements. You can also make a separate website and shift it to the original one when it will be ready. It's normal to have mistakes when you are making any kind of changes to your website. And, it's easy for you to fix it when you aren't working on a live website.

Maintain the same structures of the old and new website

Customers like to go with the old way of using a website, they take time to get used to the new structures. Familiarity is something that makes it easy and comfortable for the customer to use the website. Avoid changing the website structure when you decide to redesign your website. After finishing the website redesigning, compare the structure to the original one by crawling the new site.

Save your website's original information

You need to keep similarities in your old and new websites, for this you have to make a list of old website's pages. Check their URL, if the URL is different, then convey these changes to search engines with the help of 301 redirects. Failure to notify search engines will put you at great risk of losing your rankings and customer's trust, and ultimately your website loses organic traffic.

Use a temporary URL for your new website.

Set up a temporary URL to avoid any kind of disruption in old to new website transition. By setting up a temporary URL, you can now copy the old website to that temporary URL and make any kind of changes you want. Don't forget to index the temporary created URL, as you don't want this to show on search engines until the new website is ready to go live. Once you have completed your website, switch the domain and make your new website live.

Use 301 Redirects

For every particular page on your old website, you need 301 redirects. The information that the URL of the particular page changed is conveyed to search engines by 301 redirects. 301 redirect makes sure that your website audience can find what they actually need. The working of social media links and bookmarks on the original website as well as on the new website takes place when it goes live with the help of 301 redirects. When you are creating the 301 redirects, ensure that each page 301 redirect points on the new website containing the same content. If it is not done, then ensure that similar content is used. Try to avoid making general redirects that do redirects of old pages to the new homepage of the website. This will make your customers frustrated.

Use Good 404 Pages

As you have seen, that 404 page is a commonly found message when you are about to redesign your website. It's just because pages might get shuffled or lost or sometimes links don't work. A good 404 page will provide great help to your visitors and search engines to find back what they need. You can also make customers and search engines friendly websites just by creating a search engine box on the website page. And, also keep 404 pages on your website menu.

Keep Track of Backlinks

Every website owner has a fear of this. Losing the links that took years, is something valuable. For this, you have to contact the most popular owners that move your backlinks to your new website and if you want to change any links ask them. And if you find it's not possible then accumulate the backlinks to the pages that have 301 redirects.

After the New Website Goes Live

Once you have redesigned your website and it is live, you can compare your before and after bounce rates of the redesigned website. If you find an increase in your bounce rate, that means your users are not happy with your redesign. So you need to improve or make changes that make your users happy.