As the trends, technology, and user expectations are rapidly changing over time, if you want to remain competitive, discarding outdated website and implementing a site redesigning is crucial. However, this often poses a threat from the SEO perspective. You sure don’t want to lose your valuable traffic earned through the continuous SEO efforts? Be cautious as some little mistakes can cost you dearly and may get you to back to square one!
In this article, we will explore some web design mistakes that can affect SEO. A wholesome idea of this will help you to avoid potential pitfalls while redesigning your site. Let’s dive in then.
Loopholes in Website Redesigning that May Affect SEO
Here’s a list of common site redesigning mistakes that you should avoid at any cost.
- Deleting Pages without Redirecting
While redesigning your site, you may find out that some pages no longer carry any value. Less experienced web designers will simply delete them or rename the pages which in most of the cases lead to a change in URLs.
This is a huge mistake as some of these existing pages may already rank well. They may also have several inbound links pointing to them or visitors may have bookmarked them. Once you delete these pages, you will lose all the SEO values from the links. This in turn, adversely impact ranking.
Further, people clicking these links or bookmarks will come across a 404 page that creates a negative user experience. And as you may already know, Google considers user experience as a crucial ranking factor.
This is why reliable website design company professionals recommend to redirect these pages to the most relevant page existing on your site. A 301 redirect comes in handy in such cases. This informs the search engines that the old pages have permanently been moved to a new location. That way, you won’t lose any SEO traffic or link juice.
- Not Performing a Functionality Check
We understand that you had a highly functional website. But this cannot make you settle down peacefully that even the redesigned website will exhibit the highest functionality. Once your redesigned site is migrated to the live server, make sure to review all the functionalities. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Search bar functionality
- Check out page functionality
- Contact forms
- Site loading Speed
- All the payment methods
- Multimedia players
- Interactive tools
- Backend analytics
- Inbound links
- Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tool verification
Remember, site performance is a crucial aspect in technical SEO, so website functionality check is a must!
- Not Configuring Plugins
After migrating a website to a live server, you should immediately check the configuration of WordPress along with all the plugins. This may seem to be an irrelevant step (and often overlooked by many) but trust us when we say, it leaves an adverse impact in the long run. It can affect how the search engines treat your site.
Here’s a list of plugins you must keep an eye on:
- SEO
- Caching
- Sitemaps
- Redirection
- Schema
- Failing to Perform a Full Crawl During Site Migration
While migrating a website, usually you will first migrate the site into a development environment. After executing the changes and performing adequate tests, you will again send it back to the live server.
Now, this process can be a bit overwhelming and you can make undesirable mistakes if you are not proficient in this. One of the most common issues we have found is some links pointing to the wrong place. Let’s analyse it with an example.
A web page or a post on a live website may display a link that points to:
domain.com/services/
Once it is migrated to the development environment, it may look as follow:
devdomain.com/client111/services/
Now, when you migrate the modified site back to the live server you sure expect the link to display the earlier format (domain.com/services/)? However, sometimes we find that the migrated and live website display the links pointing to the pages within the development environment (devdomain.com/client111/services/).
Mind you, this is just one example. A website contains numerous links including links to JavaScript, essential image, and CSS files.
A thorough crawling can give you a break from all these. You may use tools like Screaming Frog or SEMrush that can crawl all the links present on your website. Modify accordingly and you are good to go! This will also enable the search engines to better crawl your site and index.
- Changing Image Names On Pages that Rank High
If a web page is ranking well and you need not execute too many alterations (like redirecting it) try not to change the name of an image. As part of a redesign process, you may end up replacing old images with a larger, high-pixel image but without a proper alt tag. Simply writing image1.jpg will not carry any value to the search engines. Either use a similar image (in higher quality) and keep the alt tag as it is or change the image following the proper alt tag optimization practices.
Conclusion
As you can understand, gone are the days when website designing and SEO were two distinct things and web designers need not require much SEO knowledge. But as the competition is increasing in the digital world, all the elements are getting interlinked and one has the potential to affect another. This is why web designers essentially need some SEO knowledge these days. Be cautious before hiring a website development company for your site design as a little mistake can cost you dearly!
These little mistakes are not any difficult or complicated to avoid. We hope the article will come in handy once you plan to redesign your website.