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One of the most natural aspects of brand development is the redesigning of its business website. A redesign will help in keeping your business stay relevant and would specify your message. As a result of this the user’s experience of your website, you can also improve and make it updated with current web standards.
Benefits of a Website Redesign
Redesigning can also help in improving your SEO and organic traffic. You must consider search engine optimization factors before commencing with your redesigning procedure. In this article, you will learn about some of the benefits of a website redesign and essential aspects that you must stay aware of when redesigning your e-commerce website.
1. An Audit of Your Website
You need to use crawling tools to get the index of the web pages from your website and other important metadata which you would require as a reference point through the process. You must save your crawls. This benefits of a website redesign can help in ensuring the continuity between the original website’s design and the new design.
Once the crawling is finished you must try to identify issues like: Duplicate page title, image alt, H1 tag, meta descriptions, Missing page title, Page titles that are under 150 pixel or even over 512 pixel, any Meta description that is over 923 pixels, all the Links to the 404 pages, the Links to the 301 pages, the Links to other 3xx and 5xx status codes URLs, inconsistent uses of the https and HTTP or the www and non-www.
You must also look for any mismatches that are in your URLs and see if the number that is crawled and number that is indexed in Google is the same or not. You will also need to ensure that you have the XML site maps and have copies of it with you. Also, remember to have the robots.txt file with a copy to go with it.
2. Set Your Test Site Up
When you are about to set your test site up, you will need to advise your developers in following certain important guidelines during the process. These guidelines will ensure efficiency. Your original website will need to act like a template for your new site during the crawling process. You need to have copies of the first original crawl then make necessary notes regarding the changes which have been made in it. This will be specifically concerned with the new URLs which were changed and removed.
You should address all the issues that you have encountered while auditing your old site and note the changes in your original site’s crawl copy. You should ensure that your new site isn’t indexed with the robots text file. Do not make any cumbersome changes in the filenames or in your URL folders. You should try to keep them as close to the first as you can. The exceptions should be to deal with the inconsistencies or the pages which you don’t want to keep anymore.
If you change any URLs, then remember also to change their links. You must have the .ht access and redirect your old URLs towards the new URLs. The links with 301 pages would lose their ranks and can create extra server load. You must eliminate all the links of the pages which you want to remove.
Note these changes in your old site’s crawl copy. When you consolidate the pages to a central resource, then you must update your links in order to ensure that they are pointing towards your new sources. You must not make any soft 404 pages by doing a replacement of the missing pages with new redirects to your homepage. The search engine algorithms would pick this up and can penalize you severely for this.
3. Auditing Your Test Site
You will have to crawl the new test site. You can find several online tools to do this. You can use the same crawlers which you had used in the first original site for this purpose. You will need to export that crawler and can refer to it as the first crawl of the test site. You must make new copies of the original site’s crawl reports with all the important changes in it and then perform thorough searches and replace operations in order to ensure that all the URLs will have a similar structure with that of your test site.
After this, you will need to set the crawler into a list mode and then crawl your test site. This benefits of a website redesign will help in checking all the URLs individually and help to find out the corresponding pages in your new site for all the pages on the old website. You must export all of this and finally call it the final crawl report of your test site.
Thus, you will Need to do all of This:
A crawl report of your original site is necessary along with a copy in which you have noted the edits. So, you may refer to it later to address the required fixes.
A crawl report of the first test site and keep a copy of it which you may edit later so that you can refer to any fixes.
A final crawl report of the test site that will contain the results of the checking of the individual URLs by using the test crawl text file.
By following the benefits of a website redesign and steps mentioned above, you will ensure that the redesigning procedure of your eCommerce website stays effective and your organic search traffic is not lost. If you want to know more about web designing, then you can check out with website designers in NY.
Conclusion
It is very important to ensure that you have a thorough communication between your web designers and the SEO team. This will help you in clearly defining your SEO goals. You will need to have the correct crawl data of your original website and your test site during the benefits of a website redesign. This will ensure that the redesigned website doesn’t lose traffic. Hopefully, the information mentioned in this article will have helped you.
