Nobody likes to see the same things repeatedly. This invokes boredom and consequently all interest for the same gets exhausted. It is for this reason that redesigning your website happens to be portion of the natural brand cycle.
Redesigning helps to keep your message clear and your brand relevant to the users. Not only that, it can intensely enhance the user experience and it is absolutely necessary to match with the developing web standards.
But in this case one needs to understand that redesigning means throwing away all the SEO efforts that you have put in and hence losing the search traffic. Therefore, communication between the developers and SEO professionals is extremely vital to derive the desired end result.
For the same reason, all through the redesign process the SEO of the site should be a vital consideration. Just read on to know how to go about it.
- Crawl and Audit the Actual Site – Utilise a crawl tool to derive an index of the pages and the numerous important parts of metadata that you will want to consider during the process of redesigning. Save the crawl as that will be necessary to ensure the continuity between the old and new sites. Identify the issues after the crawl and create a spreadsheet for every issue that you find like missing or identical page titles, H1 tags, image alts and meta descriptions and page titles above 512 pixels or under 150 pixels or links to 404 or 301 pages. You should also check for disparity in the number of URLs crawled. Ensure you have the robots.txt files and the XML sitemap and have one or two copies of the same.
- Set Up the Site of Test – While setting up the test site, the developers must keep in mind the following –
- The actual site should act as a template for the new one
- Ensure that the new site remains non-indexed from within the robots.txt files
- Do not make needless changes to the URL filenames and folders
- Any of the URLs that are altered should have the changed links
- Get rid of any links to the pages that are being removed and make note of them in the copy of the old site crawl
- Refrain from creating soft 404s by substituting the missing pages with redirects to irrelevant pages
- If you don’t want to do manual SEO for your online store, I suggest signing up with a SEO friendly Online Store Builder like Pinnacle Cart eCommerce Platform.
- Crawl and Audit the Site of Test– Again crawl and audit the test site using the crawler that you have used before. Begin by confirming that the issues discovered through crawling the actual site are absent in the test site crawl. This way you will get a testing file of crawl text that contains the actual site crawl amended to match the test site’s structure of URL. You can use the files to check whether there are any discrepancies between the old and the new sites.
- Go for Preparing the Redirects of All Altered URLs – You must identify the URLs that you haven’t yet setup a redirect. In case there are no great matching pages on the site of test, leave the 404 page in place after noting it in the test site.
- Ensure Consistent Internal Links – This is the time to ensure that all the new site’s links point to all the fitting and right pages.
- Finalisation and Launch –By this time the site should be ready for launching after addressing all the issues. There are a number of things you will need to confirm in this case. Get rid of the non-index completely from the site at the time of migration. Go for running a last crawl after the launch for making sure there are no issues in transferring the test site to the final location.
At the time of redesigning your ecommerce website the professionals of reputed web development company suggest the above to be considered. Only then you will be able to achieve the right site that will succeed in generating more leads for your business.
2,755 total views, 6 views today