WordPress Tips

Redesigning a website or migrating to a new content management system involves intricate planning and hard work. Without taking the appropriate precautions, your SEO can experience a complete catastrophe during the process.

When executed correctly, a redesign should be seamless. When implemented incorrectly, a redesign can produce a disaster.

You know the critical importance of organic searches. If you lose a majority of those searches, your rankings, traffic, leads, and conversions will suffer.

NOYO Web Development wants to help you prevent such a catastrophe.

Here are some specific steps to take prior to migration, during the launch, and after the launch to minimize your risks when redesigning your website.

Prior to Migration

Set your objectives and project plan. You most likely have several compelling reasons for considering a website redesign. These could include UX improvements, business-use cases, SEO improvement, or marketing initiatives.

Defining your objectives is a key factor to ensuring success of the project.

A key aspect of ensuring the project will be a success is setting appropriate goals. You will need to measure your baseline or benchmark for comparing after the launch, and you need a detailed outline of your project plan from start to finish.

Most website redesign projects follow an agile methodology, which is managed by the project owner regardless if that person is in project management, account service, IT, or an aligned stakeholder. Have your SEO steps outlined including a checklist, timing, and quality control steps so everyone remains aware of that aspect of the project.

Content & Information Architecture

The context of the website content and sub-topic themes are crucial to SEO success. This is ensured with the specific content on the website and how it is organized. Changes to the sitemap, information architecture, and overall content plan should address any existing weaknesses in the SEO plan.

Migrate all pages from the existing site that have good to excellent SEO value, and ensure that the new design enhances the theme and message rather than dilute them. Begin with the existing sitemap and build upon that foundation for the new sitemap. A crawling tool can help you find every page of your website.

On-page Optimization

Review the relevancy of the content down to the page level. After determining the new architecture, you can proactively optimize the content at page level for specific factors to enhance relevancy, such as the page title, URL, meta description, alt text, body copy, and more.

The depth of the changes to the sitemap and architecture will control the process of determining the relevancy of the content.

Redirects

The best UX comes from ensuring that you map out all 301 redirects for any pages receiving a new URL or for those being eliminated from the new website. You want to avoid 404 error pages. While search engines don’t necessarily punish 404 error pages, it’s still a risk for losing leads and customers.

It is highly important to make sure that all pages that have links pointing to them are appropriately redirected, especially if you don’t have control over ensuring the links are updated to the new destination page URL. This can be the most labor and time intensive task, especially if you are redesigning a large website.

NOYO Web Development has been redesigning and migrating existing websites to WordPress for over 10 years. We have extensive experience with enterprise level websites, as well as SMEs with smaller sites. We recommend WordPress as the best and most cost effective CMS to all of our clients. Contact us today if you are considering a website redesign. We offer a free consultation with no obligation.