But, redesigning a website could bring a number of changes to your website like experiencing a change in users' behaviour and seeing a drop in your site's traffic initially. But, you don't need to panic. There may be many questions running through your mind while taking the decision of redesigning your site like - How will redesigning affect the site's traffic? What if the site has broken links or errors? How will redesigning affect the site's SEO?
This is a very crucial question - How will redesigning affect the site's SEO? You need to make sure that while changing the look of your website, you are not negatively affecting the SEO performance of your site. In order to maintain this, there are quite a few things you need to take care of. You can also contact professional SEO experts in Bangalore to help you revamp your website, without having a negative effect on your site's ranking.
Work on new website while keeping the old site in place
While you are in the process of redesigning, don't commit the mistake of pulling down your old website. Let it be working until you finish the redesigning process. If you pull it down, it will highly affect the site's traffic because your website would be showing 'Website under maintenance' until you upload the new website, and this will have a negative effect if shown for a longer period of time. So, what you could do is copy your existing website to a temporary URL and make changes there until you are satisfied. Once you are ready with the new design, you just need to switch the domain.
Retain the same URLs if possible or use a 301 redirect
Try maintaining the same URLs for your new website as far as possible because changes in URLs can lead to loss in traffic through inbound links. If still, it is necessary for you to change the URLs, then you must conduct a 301 redirect map campaign to retain your site's traffic. A 301 redirect will let search engines know that you have changed your URL. This will also have users landing on your old pages to be redirected to the respective new pages and will ensure that your social media links and bookmarks will be working perfectly even after the new website goes live.
Check for broken links
Check for any broken links before getting your new website live. You may be having broken links in your CSS and JavaScript, which will bring you problems later. So, it is better to check them well before uploading your new site. There are many tools that can help you check if all your links are valid or not.
Switching to the new website
Now that you have made all the changes and are sure to go live, switch to the new website. But, make sure to do this all at once. Don't go live in different stages because this might hinder crawling from search engines. Google recommends switching to the new site all at once to accelerate crawling.
Get your new website verified with Google Webmaster tools
Now that you have gone live, check if everything works well and then, get yourself verified with Google Webmaster tools. This is important so that Google can index your new website. If you haven't been verified, you should get your site verified again with Google.
Now, you need to keep monitoring from time to time for the user experience, bounce rate and social media counts for your new website. You need to make sure that you have increased traffic, better user experience, increased social media counts and lower bounce rates on your new site. If you are afraid that you might lose out on traffic and SEO, and thus, you do not redesign your website, then it is impractical on your part. Google suggests that you must keep your website up-to-date and must continuously keep improving your design and features to rank well. So, don't keep yourself behind. There are many technical details to follow while redesigning a site for which you may need to hire professionals. Jain Technosoft is one such company who can offer you the best website redesign services in Bangalore and guide you with the setup of your new website.
SUMMARY
You might be worried about losing traffic and SEO of your website if you redesign it. But, if you follow the steps given in this article, you will definitely be able to increase the traffic on your site and make sure that the ranking and SEO performance of your site is not affected even after redesigning it.