Due to the enormous time, money, and effort required, redesigning a website can be a challenging task. The potential influence on SEO and organic traffic is one of the main worries when revamping a website. Understanding what changes will be made and how those changes will influence SEO is crucial to ensuring that your website’s SEO is not adversely impacted during the redesign process.
Changing the SEO components is one of the important things to take into account while redesigning a website. This encompasses elements like the information architecture, URLs, and content of the website. It is crucial to comprehend how these changes will affect SEO and to have a strategy in place for dealing with any potential problems that may surface.
The website’s underlying technology is a crucial factor to take into account when redesigning it. This includes elements like the infrastructure and design of the website. To guarantee that these modifications do not adversely affect SEO or user experience, it is crucial to properly test them.
Important Factors For The Redesign Process
When redesigning a website, it’s essential to make changes to the SEO components to avoid harming the site’s organic traffic. Understanding how the redesign will affect SEO is made simpler by identifying the aspects that are changing.
The SEO elements will include things like:
- The content of pages
- How pages are named
- The copy on the pages
- What images do the pages contain
- What the URL is for your pages
The new copy should closely resemble the old or be correctly aligned with a new content strategy, for instance, if you are changing the copy of your pages. To do this, you need first determine which phrases your priority pages are currently ranking for. Similar to this, before altering an image on a page, you should check to see if it is already appearing in Google’s SERP features and for which queries.
After that, you might want to think about a few other issues, like:
- How are we altering the website’s structure?
- Are there any new or deleted pages or sections?
- Are the internal links being updated or cleaned up?
- Do we introduce internal links?
To identify which page is the stronger one and then choose the canonical version into which the weaker pages will be combined, for instance, you should take into account the relative levels of organic traffic associated with each page and the keywords they are ranking for.
You should also check that the page’s breadcrumb links and BreadcrumbList schema are correct representations of the new information architecture of your website.
When rebuilding a website, it’s crucial to exercise caution and strategic planning to prevent harm being done to the SEO components.
Changing The SEO Elements
Analyzing the individual SEO components and keeping track of what is being changed is one of the most crucial steps in determining how the SEO of your site can be impacted by a makeover.
The SEO components will consist of the following:
- The content of pages
- How pages are named
- The copy on the pages
- What images do the pages contain
- What the URL is for your pages
The influence of SEO is easier to understand once you know precisely which components are changing.
The new copy should closely resemble the old or be correctly aligned with a new content strategy, for instance, if you are changing the copy on your pages. To do this, you need first determine which phrases your priority pages are currently ranking for.
Similar to this, before altering an image on a page, you should check to see if it is already appearing in Google SERP features and for which queries.
After that, you might want to think about a few other issues, like:
How are we altering the website’s structure?
- Are there any new or deleted pages or sections?
- Are the internal links being updated or cleaned up?
- Do we introduce internal links?
- All of those factors could potentially have an impact on SEO, either positively or negatively.
Say, for example, that we are eliminating or combining some pages. Because the pages are too similar to one another, merging them will help you avoid the drawbacks of duplicating content, such as term cannibalization and crawl bloat.
When two pages are ranking for the same keyword, the term “keyword cannibalization” refers to the division of the SEO authority for the respective themes of these pages.
You can have a favorable effect on rankings by integrating weaker, thinner sites with stronger ones that share a same topic.
In this situation, we would want to first decide which page is the stronger one and then choose the canonical version into which the weaker pages will be combined by looking at the relative volumes of organic traffic connected with each page and the keywords they are ranking for.
To ensure that the material, copy, graphics, etc. effectively address the issue and appropriately link out to pertinent portions of the site with internal links, you should take into consideration the elements from the relevant pages as you accomplish this.
The breadcrumb links and BreadcrumbList schema on the page should work properly and accurately reflect the current information architecture of your website if the site’s structure is changing.
Modifying the site’s underlying technology
Additional considerations must be made if the site’s content management system (CMS) is being changed. To know exactly what they do and don’t have out of the box, most content management systems feature some basic SEO skills.
Furthermore, it’s best to make sure that these new pages can be found and read by machines no matter how they are built.
Checking for Rendering Issues on Your New Website
Any website makeover should pay close attention to rendering and site speed. For instance, rendering JS can take Google up to 9 times longer than rendering HTML, which can have a significant impact on how quickly Google finds and reindexes your new sites.
This problem occurred when an auto business LSG previously worked with redesigned their internal faceted search and pagination with JS. In the past, the search filters were made up of links that gave Google crawlable paths to identify different categories like makers, models, years, etc.
There were no crawl pathways to vehicle brands, models, or years because they used JS to generate search facets without those links when they revamped the listings pages. When span> and button> tags were clicked to load new listings and update the URL, they had the same pagination problem, where the content for “?page=2,” “?page=3,” etc. didn’t use appropriate a href> links but instead used JS. Google will never click on the pagination span> elements that gave rise to those URL rewrites because it only discovers URLs through a href> links and XML sitemap submissions.
When Googlebot tries to scan and index pages, loading content with JS instead of actual a href> links can cause significant issues since, while the user will know where to go to load a new page, Google will not.
Unusual rendering can potentially cause a page to seem differently for users and Google. This can be caused by scripts that generate content taking too long to load, assets that are necessary for rendering being blocked by your robots.txt file, CSS issues that a browser can parse better than a crawler, and large page file sizes.
Use Google search console’s “Test live URL” function to see how the page is rendered for Google to make sure you don’t have this problem. By doing so, you may check for rendering difficulties and see a screenshot of the page as it appears to Google.
Although it’s frequently acceptable if your site’s functionality differs slightly from how it appears to Google, you should be able to see the important links, styling, and elements you’d want Google to crawl, such as portions of the navigation bar at the top of the page, SEO-critical head> elements, images, and primary content, which should be either visible in the browser or in the rendered DOM using the inspect tool.
In conclusion, using complex Javascript rendering libraries as the primary foundation for your website can frequently be counterproductive from an SEO perspective if you have a simpler static website without many dynamic elements. However, if you have a more dynamic website with many elements that change frequently based on complex logic, then you will likely need to use JavaScript to render your pages’ content.
Issues with Website Performance and Speed
A redesign should also take website speed into account. Based on actual user data from Google Chrome users, Google employs three key criteria to assess page speed, which are referred to as Core Web Vitals (CWV). Google and your users’ perceptions of the performance of your site will be influenced by your ability to pass CWV measurements, which is a ranking consideration. the following CWV metrics:
- LCP (biggest contentful paint): The amount of time it takes for the viewport to render and show the largest content element that can be seen on the screen without scrolling (also known as “above the fold”) when the user accesses the URL. The largest items are usually massive images, videos, or blocks of text.
- FID (first input delay): is the amount of time that elapses between a user’s initial interaction with your page (such as clicking a link, tapping a button, or scrolling, for example) and the browser’s response. This evaluation is based on the user’s initial click on the interactive component. FID may suffer as a result of late-loading JavaScript occupying the browser’s processing threads.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Every unforeseen layout shift that occurs throughout the entire page-loading process is referred to as a CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). One of the most frequent examples of a CLS problem is when you try to click a button and an unexpected new element loads in above it, pushing the button down and compelling you to click in the wrong place. The separate layout shift ratings are added up to create the CLS metric. The score can vary from 0 to any positive integer, with 0 signifying no moving and larger values signifying more shifting of the page layout.
There are many strategies to increase page performance and address site speed during a redesign, but a few key ones are as follows:
- Get rid of the extra code (e.g CSS or JS). Even if a page only uses 450kb of the 6MB of JS it contains, the page must still load the entire 6MB in order to access the 450kb. All three CWV metrics can benefit by optimizing the quantity and size of scripts.
- Load crucial resources first. Consider giving code, pictures, or other page elements a higher priority so that the most taxing elements load last and the most important ones come first. Preload any scripts and images required for rendering above-the-fold content while delaying or lazy loading all other scripts and graphics. LCP can be severely harmed by render-blocking scripts that demand parsing before the browser can display viewable content.
- Set minimum CSS heights for your page’s above-the-fold areas. Having an empty area for a hero picture to load into can assist prevent CLS shifting when that image finally loads if it will load later than other items.
- Put any CSS that is essential for styling content above the fold inline in your head>, and make sure that none of it interferes with CSS files that will load later.
Consider the user’s needs when creating the site in order to avoid making it excessively slow, preventing the rendering of more vital material, or otherwise performing poorly enough to get punished by Google or make Google lose interest and move on before rendering all of your content.
Using Google Search Console, you may assess the page’s functionality and spot any potential problems in the “Core Web Vitals” area.
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