How To Avoid Traffic Drop During Website Redesign
Change is the only constant in life. No matter how smartly you have designed your website, after a couple of years you will need to change it. People tend to avoid change because it scares them and business owner more so. Can you imagine the drop in traffic that would occur while the redesign was in process? Have you considered though the amount of loss you might be making not updating your old website? It seems like a catch-22 situation. You could end up in a large loop of, we might lose out on customers if we redesign our website. So we must keep it the same, if we keep it the same then we are losing out on customers. We have not updated our website design. Luckily for us, we now have a way to fix and possibly avoid the drop in customers while our website redesign services are in progress.
How Do You Avoid Traffic Drops During Website Redesign?
If you are yet to implement the website redesign process then you can follow the steps mentioned in this blog to have little or no traffic loss as your website redesign service is in progress.
SEO the Redesign Process:
If you do not have an SEO Strategist on your team then you need to get on. An SEO Expert will be able to best tell you design team to avoid design conflicts that could seriously hurt your website traffic. Your design team would be experts in design and UI, but listening to the experts opinion on SEO related topics will certainly help avoid traffic loss. In fact, the suggestions make will help boost your Search Engine Rankings but the rise in traffic as well.
Use your existing Sitemap to Build New Architecture:
You already have a pretty decent foundation for your website. But it needs work. Instead of tearing down the entire building, use the blocks to create a whole new structure. In essence you need to use your existing sitemap to study the current structure of your website. Find out where you can make changes to improve the user experience on your site. In some cases, your URLs and general structure can remain the same. But if your current URLs aren’t set up in a logical way (ex. With relevant subfolders and appropriate page titles), a redesign is the perfect opportunity to fix this issue.
Setup 301 Redirects:
If you do decide to change your site architecture completely ensures to set up proper redirects for your links. One of the most common causes of traffic loss during a website redesign is the loss of proper links to your pages. You might have done a lot of back linking and social media activity. You don’t want to lose out on traffic from those sources because they’re all landing on pages that no longer exist. Even simple chage of structure from www.example.com/webdesignagency-pune/ to www.example.com/web-design-agency-pune/ needs to be properly redirected. No exceptions.
Create A New SiteMap:
Before re-launching your site ensure to generate a new site map and upload it to the backend. A site map basically is to help the google bots effectively crawl your entire website. If you have a small website with less than a hundred pages, you can easily build a sitemap from one of the many sitemap generators found online.
Utilize A Google Analytics Tracking Code:
Once you’re done with the sitemap also make sure to have the new analytics tracking code in place for your site. If your code is missing you will lose of good data and you won’t be able to tell if you have lost traffic during your redesign or not.
CodePlateau one of Pune’s best web design agency has handled several website redesigns for its clients. We are happy to say that we generally manage to keep the traffic drop below 5% (Industry standard is 10-15%). If you are looking for a web design agency in Pune give us a call. We will make sure your precious traffic stays with you.
