It’s too easy to compromise your SEO when redesigning a website. Here’s a glimpse of what can go wrong:
- Loss of rankings and traffic.
- Link equity losses.
- Broken pages.
- Slow page loading.
- Terrible mobile experience.
- Broken internal links.
- Duplicate content.
For example, this site eliminated approximately 15% of its organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an organic traffic loss of nearly 50% (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) later did not help recover traffic.
Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to avoid these and other common problems: all you need is six simple rules to follow.
Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures that you can restore the original site if something goes wrong.
Ask the site developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they have to do is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite the current databases as well.
It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself either. Check to see if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you use WordPress or a similar CMS.
Test your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and pre-publish mobile optimization are the best way to ensure your new site complies with Google’s page experience guidelines.
The fact is that redesigning a website can seriously affect the speed, stability, responsiveness and mobile experience of the site. Some design flaws will be fairly easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout that doesn’t scale well to mobile devices, but not others, such as unoptimized code.
Ask your site developer to run mobile-friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.
- Unwanted noindex pages.
- Sites accessible as both http and https.
- Broken pages.
Then, before the new site goes live, click New scan In Site verification and then again immediately after publication.
Then, after scanning, go to All the problems report and check the Change column: new errors detected between scans will be colored red (resolved errors will be green).
You may want to give some issues a higher priority than others. Discover our opinion on the most impactful SEO technical problems.
Tip
You can access the site’s audit history by clicking the project name in Site verification.
By URL structure I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:
- ahrefs.com/blog TO ahrefs.com/blog/
- ahrefs.com/blog TO ahrefs.com/resources/blog
- ahrefs.com/blog TO blog.ahrefs.com
- ahrefs.com/site-audit TO ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool
Alteration of this structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:
- Broken redirects: Redirects that lead to non-existent or inaccessible pages.
- Broken backlinks: External links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
- Broken internal links: internal links to the site that do not work, hindering navigation of the site and the discoverability of the contents.
- Orphan pages: Unlinked pages from your site, making them difficult for users and search engines to find.
Of course, you should keep the old URL structure unless you are absolutely safe you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will have to put some on-site redirections. Beyond that, be sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site more quickly.
Tip
Google also recommends submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages at once. You may want to do this if this is the case with your redesign project.
Redesigns often include some sort of content pruning or simply the arbitrary deletion of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial to maintain pages that already rank high.
Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, they likely have backlinks that you risk losing.
To make sure you don’t eliminate the best stuff, use two reports Explore the Ahrefs site: Top pages AND Better via link.
Main pages the report is a list of all pages on your site ranked in the top 100, attached with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. Then, just one click on the left side and you will see a list of your best “traffic generators”.
THE Better via link the report follows the same logic, but focuses on links (both external and internal) and shows all crawled pages on your site (not just those ranked in the top 100).
You can also link to any page Explore the Ahrefs site and see if it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.
Recommendation
If part of your redesign involves an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you no longer offer if you create an “archive” page and link it to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do this regularly.
This way, you can still rank for related terms and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.
Finally, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design forces significant changes to your top-ranking pages, be especially careful when editing these elements:
- Keywords in the text, title and H1: Changing keywords can alter the relevance of the page for matching queries. For example, if a product page positions itself as “kids scooter,” you might lose it if you start scraping the phrase away from crucial parts of the content.
- Depth of content: Expanding or reducing content should be done with the intent to better meet user needs, provide more value, or clarify existing information (e.g., search intent). Keep in mind that Google rewards helpful, people-focused content and not necessarily creative, persuasive copywriting.
- Internal links: Changing/cutting some internal links shouldn’t cause any harm, but you need to be tactical about it: ask yourself if any particular changes could hurt the rankings. Keep in mind that internal links help flow link equity and help Google understand the context of your pages.
- Distance of that page from the home page: Keep high-value pages close to the home page to signal their importance to search engines.
- Schema markup: Any changes should aim to accurately describe the content and take advantage of suitable schema properties.
- Page speed: Don’t overuse heavy graphics, animations and videos. Again, be sure to pre-test your staging site for CWV and perform a site audit immediately after launch.
Final thoughts
While an overall site redesign might seem like a good time to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and value of the backlinks your site has already earned. If you change too much at once, you won’t know what worked and why and, perhaps more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.
The truth is that SEO is always a matter of experimentation. You can have a very educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.
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