Website Redesign SEO ChecklistAnalyze your current site, inventory your high-performance content, determine your SEO goals, optimize your existing content, set up 301 redirects, update your site architecture, optimize your page speed, update your XML sitemap. Backups are another essential component of website redesign and SEO. If you need to restore your old site, such as if you forgot to redirect a page, you can go back to your backup. While you can back up your website to a computer or laptop, you can also set up a temporary server to host your website.
Carefully make these changes to your URLs. Use 301 redirects from old URLs to newer URLs to make sure you don't lose the fairness of the links because of the valuable backlinks your pages have earned. Yes, 30-fold redirects no longer lose PageRank). After 3 to 6 months, evaluate the performance of your website by comparing it to the numbers before the redirect.
What do your rankings, traffic, and conversions look like? These metrics will determine the success of your website redesign efforts. If there's one thing I'd like you to get out of this post, it's that redesigning a website can be brutal for SEO if you try to do everything at once. And even if your website is up and running and everything is a big SEO success, before you drink the champagne of victory, take another look to make sure that everything is OK and that your “newly created site” doesn't lose its ranking in search engines. You can do this manually by adding each updated URL of your site to the map or use an SEO plugin such as Yoast or AIOSEO to generate one automatically.
However, if search engines view the content of your new website and your user engagement signals in a significantly modified way, your search traffic may plummet. It's easier to improve content because you already have to write completely new content, find a suitable keyword to position yourself and optimize it. From an SEO perspective, and really from everyone's perspective, you need to protect what's already working and set yourself up for future success. Don't forget to remove the password you set for the development version of the website in the pre-launch phase for a successful redesign of the SEO website.
Ideally, you should also seek to understand your SEO weaknesses, as this will help you identify areas where you can make improvements to the new site. You can launch one of the best-designed sites in the world, but if you don't optimize it for SEO, no one will find it. Use tools like CognitiveSEO or Moz, Woorank and even Google Search Console to generate substantial data. Content is a fundamental element for SEO, and if you delete parts of your content, you could end up with a blog that contains content from a year or two ago.
If there's a significant change in your SEO, try to understand why this is happening and look for a solution if your website traffic slows down quickly. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that can analyze, audit and review your website from an SEO perspective.
