At least once a year I talk to a company that went live with a new website design without consideration of protecting existing SEO value, losing traffic instantly.
Lost rankings due to another agency not protecting SEO value during a website redesign
Unless you want to lose years worth of building up your brand, here’s a basic outline of how to protect your SEO assets before going live with a new website redesign.. Or, talk to your SEO.
- Make sure all content gets migrated from the old website to the new.
- URLs can sometimes change if you’re changing website platforms. Map the old url’s to their new replacements.
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- For example, yoursite/mypage now becomes yoursite/newpage
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- Map. every. single. page. Then add redirects so Google knows where pages moved.
- Ensure all standard SEO variables like title tags and meta descriptions are recreated.
- Make sure all images within the new design are scaled to smallest required size to save on image load.
- Also, use image compression apps to save even more page load. If you’re on a Mac I like ImageOptim. If you’re on Windows, try Caesium.
- Ensure your site is set up within Google Search Console, if it’s not already. After going live, submit a new sitemap so Google can re-scan everything.
- Check back daily in case Google identifies errors on your new website. Fix them.
This is far from an exhaustive list, but hopefully it saves you a little heartache.