How to Maintain Your SEO Rankings During a Website Redesign
If the thought of redesigning your website sends you into a spiral of SEO doom, take a deep breath—you’ve got this.
Whether you’re making the leap from WordPress to Squarespace or just giving your current site a much-needed glow-up, the fear of tanking your rankings is real. But guess what? It doesn’t have to be a disaster. With the right strategy, you can refresh your site without watching your hard-earned SEO go up in flames. Here’s how to keep Google happy while giving your website the upgrade it deserves.
Key considerations for maintaining your SEO rankings during a redesign:
URL changes cause 404s
Changing your website URL structure can cause 404 errors if not properly handled. This means people are trying to visit a page using an address but you’ve moved house down the street. All the people end up seeing is a 404 error instead of the intended page (or house in this analogy). To combat this, ensure any URL changes have redirects in place, basically a forwarding address so your mail gets delivered to the right place and people can visit your new place.
Redirects can be set up directly in Squarespace under URL Mappings. Input the old URL, then 301 (which means we want this change permanently), and add the new URL.
Content updates can impact SEO for good or bad
If you’re not changing the URL but plan on adjusting the page content, that can impact SEO. Body text, headings, images, and internal links contribute to your SEO performance so if these change, so can your SEO.
If you’re changing the content to enhance your SEO by following best practices such as utilising keywords throughout, one H1 tag, alt-text, etc, then you should see an uplift in your SEO performance rather than a decline.
Don’t forget about meta titles and descriptions
If you’re deleting pages and adding new ones, don’t skip the meta titles and descriptions. These are what show up in Google search results and can make or break whether someone clicks on your site. They also contribute to how Google ranks websites so ensure this is completed.
Website redesigns can have a big impact on SEO. When done well, the improved content and URLs can improve rankings dramatically. But if redirects aren’t carefully mapped or content doesn’t follow SEO best practices, it can lower your authority and result in your website losing a lot of organic traffic.
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