A Guide to Redesigning a Website without Affecting SEO

Are you thinking of giving your website a makeover? If yes, you first need to make a strategic plan. This is because when you redesign a website, there are a number of codes and pages getting altered, impacting your site's ranking on SERPs. 

In this article, we are going to share a few steps that you can follow to save your site's SEO while redesigning it.

Step 1: Make a list of all your web pages

The first thing you need to do is download the URL structure of your site. You can use plugins to take a backup of your site and avoid the risk of impacting its ranking.

Step 2: Create a temporary URL

Don't ever start redesigning your site on the existing structure; create a temporary one to provide your visitors a hassle-free experience. Make a copy of your site, move it to a temporary URL, and begin the redesign process. 

Step 3: Check the copied version

Before redesigning, check your website for broken links, CSS, and other features. This will give you an outline of what else needs to be fixed.

Step 4: Implement proper 301 redirects

By implementing 301 redirects, you can redirect the old URLs to the new ones. This is a technical way of informing search engines that your website has moved to another URL so that they don't downgrade your SEO efforts.

Step 5: Move to the new design

Once the tasks of redesigning and redirection are done, it's time to make the shift. After your redesigned website is up and running, you must check it for broken links with webmaster tools.

Step 6: Check your site for crawlers

While redesigning a website, there are high chances that you, unknowingly, make the search engines stop crawling your website. To resume, log in Google search console and click on the "Fetch and Render" option. Also, submit the XML of the restructured website to Google and Bing to make it crawlable. 

Step 7: Keep a close eye on your site

At last, monitor the changes and look for any potential growth. Keep an eye on the rankings of your top keywords with the aid of any of the several SEO tools available. If there is a considerable change in your SEO, find the reason behind it and resolve it before your site starts losing its traffic.

These are some easy steps you can follow to save all your SEO efforts and transfer them to your website's redesigned version.

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