How to Redesign Your Website Without Losing SEO Rankings

Redesigning a website while maintaining search engine optimization (SEO) can be tricky, even for experienced digital marketers and SEO specialists. While the relationship between website design and SEO may be instinctual for them, graphic designers and clients often don't fully appreciate this connection. As a result, website redesigns often inadvertently hurt SEO, resulting in lost traffic and lower search engine rankings.

However, with careful planning and strategic precautions, it is possible to successfully redesign a website without negatively impacting SEO. The key is taking a holistic approach that considers both design and technical factors. This involves evaluating the existing website's SEO, mapping out a migration strategy, using SEO-friendly platforms and designs, preserving quality backlinks, optimizing content for search intent, employing redirects to guard against lost rankings, and monitoring analytics during and after launch.

Essentially, SEO and website design must work hand-in-hand during a redesign. With awareness, communication, and strategic precautions, website owners can achieve their ideal redesigned website while maintaining or even boosting their organic search performance. The result is an elevated website experience for both users and search engines.

Why Redesign Your Website?

There are compelling reasons for redesigning outdated websites, including improving the mobile and responsive design experience. Websites over 5 years old likely don't cater to diverse device sizes and fail to implement modern SEO best practices. However, significant website redesigns can disrupt carefully cultivated SEO, resulting in drops in search engine rankings and traffic.

To balance the user experience upgrades with preserving SEO, strategically approach the redesign in phases. Ideally, the redesigned website will display beautifully across multiple orientations and hundreds of device sizes that users engage with daily such as desktop, mobile, tablet and more. It will load faster thanks to code optimization and score well on Core Web Vitals assessments. Search engine crawler accessibility and indexing capabilities will improve and with planning, search visibility and rankings will stay stable or even increase over time.

Maintaining communication between designers, developers and SEO specialists is key for the redesign to successfully modernize both user experience and under-the-hood technical capabilities.

Related: How Often Should You Update Your Website?

What Areas of SEO are Affected Most With a Site Redesign?

1. URLs and Site Architecture - If URLs are changed significantly or site architecture is restructured, this can break inbound links and change how pages are indexed and ranked. Redesigns often involve URL migrations and consolidations that can confuse search bots if not handled properly.

2. On-Page Optimization - Webpage content, metadata, headings, etc. need to be carefully migrated to new templates and site architecture to retain relevance signals. Image alt text, site navigation, and page titles are key on-page elements to optimize.

3. Technical Factors - Site speed, accessibility, crawlability can temporarily take a hit during launches and DNS changes. Core Web Vital metrics like LCP and CLS may be impacted. Server migrations can also disturb site indexing if bot access is disrupted.

4. Link Equity Flow - Internal link structures and external backlinks need to redirect properly to retain PageRank flow. Failing to utilize 301 redirects often drains authority during redesigns.

5. Duplicate Content Risks - Identical or overly similar page content on the old and new site can dilute signals for search bots attempting to index the new domain. This requires strategic content consolidation.

Related: Link Building for SEO: The Complete Guide to Backlinks

How to Redesign a Website Without Losing SEO Rankings

An effective website redesign strategy will drive organic traffic while visually and technically improving outdated pages. It will also allow for uncomplicated tracking code implementation and straightforward site maintenance. By following these best practices, you put yourself on the path for an optimized relaunch.

1. Make a list of every page on your current live site. Document URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and other on-page optimization elements. This inventory will guide content migration to the new site while retaining SEO value.

2. Build the redesigned website on a separate test domain. Purchase a new domain or subdirectory to house the new site files. Use a temporary or brand new URL to avoid search engine indexing issues during development.

3. Once satisfied with the revisions, conduct a comprehensive post-launch technical audit. Crawl the new site to uncover any technical SEO issues like broken links or meta tag errors introduced during the redesign.

4. Document all URL changes and set up 301 redirects to retain link equity. Create a spreadsheet mapping old URLs to new URLs. Install 301 redirects on the old site pointing to the new pages. This passes SEO value to the new URLs.

5. Make final adjustments and go live with the new website. After fixing any technical problems uncovered in the audit, officially launch the redesigned site. Monitor any transition hiccups closely.

6. Verify tracking scripts are properly implemented and collecting data. Check Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other analytics platforms to ensure tracking codes are firing correctly on all pages post-launch. Troubleshoot any data collection issues.

7. Closely observe how the redesigned pages perform in search rankings over time. Monitor rankings weekly to compare redesigned pages vs. old versions. Watch for any ranking fluctuations due to the transition and address promptly.

Final Thoughts

Redesigning your website doesn't need to be a scary endeavor. With the right planning and care you can save all of that SEO you've worked so hard to achieve. And if you're happy with your website but are always striving for better SEO, we can help you with that too!