Do you have a dusty and old site that requires a serious update? So, you make your mind to a website redesign as it is among the ways to get more revenue, leads, and traffic.

Maybe one of your friends has a degree in web designing. Their portfolio consists of new sites that have an appearance you are looking for. Your new site is live, and the traffic you expected never comes.

If this is something that happens to you, you did not focus on SEO while doing a website redesign.

Follow our SEO Checklist for Website Redesign and Migration

Step 1: Plan the Redesign Structure of Your Website

A website migration is the chance to optimize everything, including your site’s URL structure. It is time to change the format of URLs such as trailing/ no trailing slash and www/ non-www.

With a new change in the site structure, Google requires relearning how the website is structured. Usually, it takes some time to update your website index with the new detail of your website.

Step 2: Choose What You Want to Migrate

So, you update your site design and structure. Now, your website has different unique pages. Some of them are doing well, and some of them you want to delete. Finding out which pages have SEO value will help you get the organic traffic to your new redesigned website.

Here are a few things that may have an SEO value for your website. You must determine if you want to migrate:

Backlinks: The rank of your website is due to the number of backlinks your website has.

Website Traffic: Even without backlinks, some pages get organic traffic. Therefore, it is essential to know about web traffic first.

Keyword Ranking: If your page ranks for a specific keyword in the top 10 pages, you must bring that page to your new site.

Content Audit: Many pages do not rank on Google but are still crucial for your site. You cannot delete a product page on an e-commerce website just because it is unable to rank.

Just take care of these things. For your new website, it is not essential to reuse the same article. You can choose some parts to be reused for your future pieces of content.

Step 3: Make a List of Redirects

An essential part of a website redesign and migration checklist is the redirects. If the old URLs cannot redirect appropriately to your new site, the organic traffic can suffer significantly. These redirects will make sure the safe transfer of ranking signals from the old to new URL, and you do not notice a drop in your keyword ranking.

You may have some duplicate pages. Check them and redirect them using a 301 permanent redirect to bring the organic value to your new URL.

Step4: Update your site architecture

The site architecture makes the blog more intuitive for both visitors and search engine crawlers. It allows visitors to easily find different pages and understand their relationship and importance. The more pages link to a particular page, search engines give more importance to that page.

Step5: Optimize your page speed

47% of the website visitors expect a page to load in two seconds or less. Site speed is not just important for user experience but is also a ranking factor for search. Improve the website’s average page load time by compressing your files, using a caching plugin, etc.

Step6: Update your XML sitemap

A sitemap is like a floor plan for your website which helps search engine crawlers to understand the structure of the site and rank it more easily. After your website is live it is a good idea to submit the XML sitemap to Google and Bing.

This is the SEO checklist you must follow if you are redesigning your website or thinking about its migration.

References:

https://blog.hubspot.com/website/website-redesign-seo

https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/11/05/seo-strategy-website-redesign-migration/