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The cost of bad web design
A poorly designed site sends an unprofessional image, is damaging to your reputation, and fails to convert visitors into paying customers. Sites that prevent flawless content consumption experience, often get penalized by search engines too.
The need for good design & cost of doing it wrong: Infographic
Stat sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01449290500330448
https://curatti.com/web-design-usability/
https://socpub.com/articles/the-5-mobile-marketing-mistakes-infographic-14849
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/compelling-stats-website-design-optimization-list
So, when should I redesign my site?
We often recommend our clients to conduct site wide audits once every six months to spot underperforming pages, find issues in them and if it is design related, change the layout and content presentation format. Please find below more situations about when to act.
Signs your site needs a redesign, NOW!
- Your website’s bounce rate is growing at a steady pace
- If your branding is not connected with the design. For example, overemphasis on any color other than green when you are selling a natural product.
- If visitors are finding it hard to navigate through your site
- Your site is not optimized for hand-held devices like smartphones
- Your company is growing and thus your site needs to accommodate new features and functionalities
- The last time you redesigned your site was years ago
- Your site uses free themes
- You are not employing strong security measures
- Your website loads slowly
- Your UI/UX design is unappealing
- Your site is not optimized for search engines
Before redesigning, think about SEO
Now that you’re ready to give your site a facelift, all you need is a professional designer. But wait. People often go about changing their design without an informed outlook, only to experience a lot of issues later.
One of the most common issues is that a redesigned website could result in an SEO nightmare.
What’s the link between website redesign and SEO
When you redesign a site, you are changing its layout, design elements and nearly everything it was visually based upon. The structural changes can cause modifications to your site’s metadata, and other important content, thereby confusing search engine robots that used to crawl your site and formed a clear picture about the look, feel and engagement aspects of your website.
A changed site can trigger a series of countless SEO issues. But there’s a way to prevent this situation or at least minimize the aftereffects of a site redesign.
How redesigning affects SEO?
Redesign done without SEO in mind, can lead to these major consequences. There could be many more negative impact sceaniors and listing each of this is nearly impossible.
- You lose backlinks you struggled to earn
- You lose quality organic traffic to ysite
- Overload of 301 redirects can cause your siour
- te to load slowly
- Your staging site could get indexed confusing visitors and search robots about the originality of content
Simply put, all the hard work you did to shoot up your site’s chances of a favourable search engine slot could get subotized, requiring you to start from scratch, which means reinventing the entire investment cycle.
No one wants to face this situation, right? So how to redesign a site with seo best practices? This takes us to a set of very important information listed below –
How to prevent SEO issues while redesigning a website
Set your expectations, predict problems, keep solutions ready
A redesign project when gone wrong could incur huge losses. Everyone directly or indirectly involved in it should be informed about the possible consequences. Plan early to tackle challenges. This includes describing the process to owners, designers, content creators, developers and even marketing people who are associated with the project. When it comes to planning out solutions, make a list of activities possibly needed from specific teams. For example, the seo team can keep a database of redirects, the content team can rework on the metas etc. Simply put, plan early by visualizing the worst case scenario and keep experts ready to tackle the issue.
Back up
Always keep your database and old files secured and handy. Because if anything goes horribly wrong during the redesigning process, or if you plan to revert to the original site structure after redesigning, you know where to look for help.
Create a list of all published pages
Redesigning a site can actually impact its URL structure so it’s highly needed that before you hop on it, you download your site’s URL structure which is basically making a list of all the published pages. This is a pretty simple job, and could be accomplished by using tools like Yoast SEO plugin.
Try the changes on a no-index temporary URL
Never attempt redesign on your existing site since it can cause page experience issues for visitors. Instead, set up a temporary URL, copy the presently available content of the site onto the new URL and start making the changes as needed. Make sure your new site is set up to index the right URLs at the right time. Do not (in your worst nightmare) let your unfinished staging site indexed by search engines. It won’t just form a flarry of duplicated content, but also incur a range of costly SEO challenges in the long run.
Make changes slowly
Don’t make excessive changes at a time.Reflect the approved changes on the existing site non aggressively. Remember you want to look genuine to search engines. Too many drastic changes too fast can signal something is fishy, and this can eventually confuse search engines resulting in lost traffic and lost reputation.
Have a redirection strategy
If you are a webmaster yourself, you may know that keeping the URLs unchanged is a good strategy, but sometimes you may need to set up redirects in situations like when the developer has changed the URL structure, when you are using a different CMS, if you are reorganizing your pages to better suit the changing needs of your audience etc. For all these things, it’s important (read very important) to have a proper redirect strategy in place, before and after the site redesign.
Make a list of all the URLs that need to be redirected, and then set up the redirection using the .htaccess file. Doing this will help Google understand that the site’s URL has got a new address and therefore you won’t lose the SEO benefits you gained. Also, use a tool like Ahref to identify the links that pointed to you, and if possible contact the webmasters of those sites manually and inform them about the changed URL.
Redirection is a very important step and should be done quickly – possibly within a day to ensure SEO health of your site remains unchanged.
If you are not sure how to set up redirects properly, you can always contact a professional who can help you do the job smoothly. For wordpress users, a plugin can do the job for you.
Test if things are okay
When the new site is ready, the first thing is to check for issues. No other tool can provide the best result except search console.Check for possible issues affecting servers, redirects, blocked URLs, blocked by robots.txt URLs, no index, mobile usability, robot.txt corruption etc. Accordingly, try fixing the issues as quickly as possible to contain the possible negative consequences and to speed up better search performance of your recently redesigned site. Do not forget to submit the sitemap to Google.
Monitor the changes
Now that your site in its new avatar is ready to wow your audience, it’s a good idea to constantly keep a track of every little development. You could see a temporary drop in traffic, then it;s not the right approach to lose hope and think it was a failed project. Use a tool like ahref to check important benchmarks to judge your site’s seo health. The site audit feature should reveal a lot of things about your site’s present state.
Looking for help?
If you are looking for expert help to fix SEO issues for your redesigned website or if you are planning to redesign your existing site but worried about its SEO health, please don’t look further. Digital Obsession is trusted by corporations and individuals worldwide for all things SEO.
Schedule a free SEO audit of your site now.
FAQ
Is website redesign strictly technical?
Yes. A lot of tasks involved in redesigning are technical, so if you are the owner of a website that needs to be redesigned, you should seek an expert’ help rather than planning to do it on your own or use any tool without having sufficient info about using it.
Will a website redesign project poorly reflect on my site’s SEO health?
It depends how you carry out the redesigning activity. Wrongly done, you risk losing out on traffic and severely affecting the SEO profile of your website.
Does keyword ranking change when a site is redesigned?
Yes, you may see a temporary drop in traffic, but you can see the exact opposite of it too. Sometimes a redesigning project can enhance a site’s SEO performance. One such case is when a site moves away from an unsecured theme to an SEO optimized theme.
What is the most important SEO thing to consider when redesigning a site?
There’s no order of priority. Every single element detailed in this article is important to make sure your site’s SEO performance is not affected. But in case you ask, we would recommend to keep extra caution with the URL structure, indexing and timing. We’ve tried to detail everything in this article so you can make an informed decision.
