Website owners rarely think about the consequences for SEO when redesigning a website. Although, most often, the redesign follows a change in the structure of the site, and sometimes a change in the engine of the site itself. And this entails major changes in search engine optimization.
I will describe the most obvious points that should be paid attention to those who plan to redesign the site.
#1 The emergence of new subdomains
Imagine the situation: your site has 2+ language versions and when you change the design of the site you decide that it would be nice to transfer non-core versions to subdomains.
Here lies the error. If before all your language versions were considered search engines, as part of your main site, then with the move, subdomains will be counted as separate sites with their own authority and history.
This means that all links that stood on other language versions will not be counted. Or they will, but with a smaller “weight” and only if you put paginated 301 redirects.
What should be done?
Do not transfer other language versions of the site to subdomains (and you should not create new ones on subdomains either). Leave them in subfolders (for example, yoursite.com/en/).
# 2 Redirection setup
Most likely, a change in design will entail a change in the structure of the entire site or part of it. But if you do not take care of this in advance and do not map the redirects and do not configure them, then get something like this:
There are two problems in this case:
- The search engine sees absolutely new addresses of pages that he needs to bypass, read and add to the index. And not the fact that the new pages will have the same positions as their old counterparts.
- Links to old URLs are no longer counted for new ones. And because your pages that you so diligently “pushed” to the top, can get out of it for a very long time.
What should be done?
- Map redirects, where in one column indicate the addresses of the old URIs that will be changed, and in the second – indicate the corresponding new URIs.
- Set a task for the site developer to set up page-by-page 301 redirects according to the redirect map immediately after rolling out a new design.
# 3 Texts
SEO-sharpened texts – this is one of the components of the internal site optimization. Therefore, it is important that with any changes on the site they remain in the same places.
But it happens that with the change of design and text are deleted. Sometimes they simply forget to add them, and sometimes there is simply no room for texts in the new design.
These texts contain keywords for which the page is ranked in the search, because deleting them will result in you losing your position.
There may be another option that the text is displayed in the new design, but partially – most of it is hidden under the field that opens with CSS or Javascript. In this case, you need to abandon the partial or complete concealment of the text, since experiments show that this is fraught with the loss of positions.
What should be done?
- Make sure that the new design provides space for SEO-optimized text.
- After the change of design – check that the texts remained in their places and unchanged.
#4 Meta data
If the texts and addresses of pages are subject to change when the design is changed, then meta-descriptions and names of pages (meta title and meta description) are even more so.
Not so bad if you lose the meta description – the search engines will pull up the necessary description themselves, but very bad if the meta title is changed. Because the title is one of the critical elements of page optimization, according to which search engines determine its content.
What should be done?
- Save all the meta title and description for the main pages in a separate file (if you have not already done so).
- Make sure all the meta stayed in place after the design change.
#five New linking blocks
It happens like this: you liked the new design, which you didn’t notice, as many blocks appeared in it with links that lead to the internal pages of the site. It looks good, but how will this affect SEO?
I’ll say right away that internal linking is crucial for large sites. But this does not mean that small sites should ignore this item. I saw with my own eyes when a small site on which several new linking blocks appeared, fell so that the search engines did not want to return it to their previous positions for almost a month.
Why is it important? Because with the help of internal linking, we say which pages are important for us (if we link to them from all other pages). And if you have blocks of links that lead to technical pages or pages that are closed for indexing, this can seriously undercut the current state of the web resource.
In addition, new link units are additional work for search robots who will spend on this crawling budget. And he is limited.
What should be done?
- Make sure that when redesigning all the old blocks of relink remained in place, just changed their appearance.
- If you strongly want to add new pass-through links on your site, then make sure that they go to fairly important pages that are not closed for indexing.
- Check that the end-to-end blocks to the most important pages that were previously linked will remain in place.
- If the pages you refer to in new blocks are more technical, then close these links with rel = “nofollow”, close the pages themselves from indexing. This will simplify the life of the search robot – it will not spend the crawling budget on them.
Mobile friendly
If your site is inconvenient to browse from mobile devices, then you are an old-man of the internet marketing world. Adaptive layout is so important that in recent years everything has been said about it already. In addition, Google roll out the mobile-first index in 2018. This means that mobile versions of sites prioritized for ranking.
What is it all about?
And besides, often in pursuit of a beautiful website design, they forget about its functionality and, more importantly for SEO, adaptability.
It will be very disappointing if you lose customers because you did not think about the layout for various devices.
What should be done?
- If you have not yet made your site responsive for mobile devices – be sure to do it.
- If the site is already convenient for mobile, then check that a new layout will also be available in the new design.
# 7 Are you a hare or a tortoise?
If you (your website) are a turtle, then you have no place in a competitive online marketing environment, as well as those who still haven’t done adaptive layout.
Site loading speed becomes not so much critical for search engines, as for the visitors themselves. We live in such a dynamic time that every minute we consume gigabytes of information from various sources. And if the download of your site takes at least ten seconds of this time, they will simply spit on you and find a replacement.
In addition, search engines also dislike such slow sites.
Changing the design entails many new graphic and media elements that can slow down the loading of a new site. Pay attention to this and be sure to tighten the load indicators to the permissible, and better to the optimum.
What should be done?
After changing the design, make sure that your site does not become slower. This will help you many online tools to check the download speed, including this one from Google. Consider all these points when changing the design and you will remain at your positions in the search results.
