Most of us have a question regarding website designing, “If I change my website will I lose my Google ranking?” The answer to this question is yes, if not done in the right way. There have been many cases in which the users faced traffic loss after migration. While redesigning a website, there are a number of things which you should take care of if you want to redesign your website without losing SEO. In this blog, we will discuss some important steps which will help you for how to keep SEO when changing the website.
#1. Set up your New Website on a Temporary URL
While setting up a new website, never try to do testing on your existing website. It is always a good practice to copy your existing website to a temporary URL and do all testing on that temporary URL. When the website is ready on the temporary URL, simply shift the domain. We do not recommend you to work on your live website because when you are making changes, a lot of things may go wrong. One more thing that you should keep in mind is make sure that the temporary URL is not indexed by Google, as it will raise the issue of duplicate content.
#2. Check the New Website for Broken Links
The second step to redesign website without losing SEO is to test the broken links on the new website. There may be broken links in CSS or Javascript of your website. Hence, it is better to correct these broken links before you go live. There are many free broken link checker tools available on the internet which you can use to test your new website. Apart from this, you can also install the extensions on your web browser like Firefox or Chrome for the same.
#3. Create a List of All Pages from your Old/Existing Website
While redesigning your website, it is normal to change the slug of the page. But it is also of great importance that you let the search engines know about these changes. If you fail to do this, your search rankings will be affected and decrease your domain authority due to which you will lose your organic traffic. To create a list of all pages easily what you have to do is take your site map and save it as a text file.
#4. Create 301 Redirects
You should redirect your new pages from the older ones because this lets Google and other search engines know that the URL of these particular pages have been changed. Due to this Google and other search engines will not consider these as two different pages. This is how to change URL without losing SEO.
#5. Switch to the New Website
This is the step for which you waited for a long time. After designing, developing, and testing your new website, it is the time to move to the new website. You are only a click away for taking your website live. You can also switch to the new website in stages, in case your website is big. But Google recommends to do it all at once because it will make crawling quick.
#6. Do Final Checks
Now your new website is live. After going live, you have to check some additional things to make sure that the new website is working properly. Perform the following checks after going live:
- First of all you have to run a broken link check on the new website.
- The second step is to check that the new website is verified with the Google Search Console.
- Now, you have to check that the new website is indexed properly.
- Finally, monitor your rankings. For this, you can use any of the rank checker tools available online.
About Webpulse Solution Private Limited
Webpulse Solution Pvt Ltd is one of the leading web designing companies in Delhi. We offer web designing services, web development services, different digital marketing services to the customers including SEO, SMM, SEM, content writing services, content marketing, etc. We have ranked many different businesses on the first page of Google due to which they have experienced an increase in their sales.