Website SEO Rank
This is something a website owner dreads more than almost anything else, the task of revamping a website without disrupting the delicate balance of a business’ internet presence. The risks of losing customers, losing website information, and losing the very important search results rankings are very real and can do long-term damage to the bottom line of the business. However, there are some things you can do to mitigate any potential damage to your business.
Do Not Work on a Live Website
This is the single most important thing to remember when making changes to your website. Do not do any kind of redesign to your website while it is live. Either disable the website while you’re making improvements (not recommended, because people who attempt to visit the website will be frustrated), or set up the new website on a separate domain and swap it with the original when ready (this is the recommended method). When you make changes to a website, it’s often a long process, and mistakes are bound to be made, so it’s easier to not have to deal with the issues of working on a live website.
Match The Structures of the Old and New Websites
Customers like familiarity, so it’s not a good idea to dramatically change the structure of your website when you redesign it. Before you get started on a new design, user a crawler to map out your existing website, how things are laid out, so that you can match the new website with it. Once you’re finished with the redesigned website, crawl the new site to compare its structure to the original site.
Save The Original Website Information
To keep similarity between the old and new websites, create a list of all the pages from the old website. If the URL is going to change for pages in the new website, you need to notify search engines about these changes by using 301 redirects. Failure to do this will damage your rankings and trust with customers, and you will lose organic traffic to your website. You should also save your sitemap of the original website to a text file, for reference later.
Use a Temporary URL for the New Website
This is how you avoid disruption in the transition from the old website to the new one. Set up the new website on a temporary URL, copying your old website to the temporary URL. Then make whatever changes you want. Make sure that you noindex this temporary URL, because you don’t want it to appear in search engine results until you’re ready to make the new website live. Once you’re finished with the new website, you can just switch the domain, and take the new website live.
If you are changing domains with your new website, there are two steps to that process. First, move the old website to the new domain, with 301 redirects. Create your new website, and then launch it on the new domain, with 301 redirects from the old website.
