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Websites have become critical assets for businesses today, serving as the digital face of the company and often the main channel for customer interaction. When it comes to redesigning or migrating a website, many companies focus solely on aesthetics and functionality, but neglecting SEO can have disastrous consequences. This is why SEO should be a key consideration during any website redesign or migration project.
Businesses redesign their websites for many reasons—keeping up with design trends, rebranding, or responding to leadership changes. While a redesign can offer a fresh look and improved user experience, it can also lead to a significant drop in organic traffic if SEO best practices are not followed. Throughout my years of working in SEO, I’ve seen redesigns lead to both tremendous success and steep declines. The difference? Careful consideration of SEO.
Why SEO is Essential in a Website Redesign
We all agree that websites have become a very important asset for a lot of businesses nowadays.
There are a lot of reasons why companies decide to redesign their websites:
- Refresh their site to make it more trendy.
- A new CEO at the company wants to change the website.
- A change in their branding.
- Etc.
It can bring a lot of opportunities for a business. Nevertheless, it can also break its SEO way too easily. During my years of experience in SEO, I have seen several websites thriving after a website redesign, and I have seen a lot of sites losing most of their organic traffic as a result of it.
When a website redesign is handled without considering SEO, there’s a very real risk of losing keyword rankings, organic traffic, and hard-earned link equity. That’s why the main objective of SEO during a redesign is twofold:
- Prevent negative impacts on organic performance: When URLs change or pages are removed without proper redirects, search engines lose the context and authority the old URLs had accumulated, leading to drops in rankings.
- Capitalise on the redesign to improve SEO: A redesign offers an opportunity to optimise elements like content, metadata, and user experience, which can lead to increased organic traffic and better rankings.
So, what are the main risks to SEO during a redesign? Let’s break down the key factors that can impact SEO performance.
6 Key SEO Considerations for a Website Redesign
Redesigning a website introduces changes to its structure, content, and user experience. Each of these can have serious implications for SEO if not handled properly. The main areas to focus on are:
- URL changes: When URLs are altered, without 301 redirects, the link equity built up by the old URLs is lost. Search engines see these as entirely new pages, which can cause rankings to drop. Every URL change should be mapped out and redirected properly to avoid this loss.
- Metadata: Meta titles and descriptions play a significant role in how search engines understand and rank your pages. During a redesign, you need to ensure that metadata is preserved or improved. Updating metadata gives you the chance to target more relevant keywords and improve click-through rates from search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Content: Website content is often updated or rewritten during a redesign, but it’s crucial to ensure that new content is as good as—or better than—the old content. Removing or drastically altering pages can lead to a loss of traffic for those specific queries. Always assess the impact of content changes on SEO performance.
- User experience (UX) and speed: Search engines like Google prioritise websites that offer a seamless, fast, and mobile-friendly user experience. When making UX improvements, it’s important to ensure that any new design elements don’t slow down the site or make it harder for users to navigate. Core Web Vitals—such as page speed and interactivity—should be a major focus.
- Website Speed and Core Web Vitals: With Google’s emphasis on Core Web Vitals, improving speed and interactivity has become a top SEO priority. A redesign is the perfect time to ensure your new site is optimised for these metrics, which include loading time, interactivity, and visual stability.
- Mobile friendliness: Mobile-first indexing means that Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing. A redesign should always ensure that the site is fully responsive and offers an excellent experience for mobile users.
Backup Before Redesigning
Before you start any redesign process, it’s critical to create a backup of your current site. Things can and do go wrong during website migrations and redesigns. If a problem arises—like a sudden drop in traffic—you want to have the option to roll back to the previous version of the site. This backup serves as a safeguard that can save your SEO and organic traffic from unexpected issues.
Pre-Launch SEO Checks
Before launching your redesigned website, a thorough SEO audit is crucial. This is your opportunity to catch and fix issues that could harm your SEO performance. A pre-launch SEO checklist should include:
- Assessing page removals: If any pages are being removed, evaluate their current organic traffic. Are these pages generating significant traffic? Will their removal negatively affect the site’s SEO? If they are important, either retain them or redirect them properly.
- URL changes: If URLs are changing, you need to create a comprehensive 301 redirect map to avoid broken links and loss of authority. Redirects should lead to the most relevant page on the new site to maintain the SEO value of the old URLs.
- Metadata: Examine the meta titles and descriptions. If the new ones aren’t optimised or aren’t an improvement on the current ones, revert to the originals. Metadata impacts how your site is displayed in SERPs, influencing both rankings and click-through rates.
- H1 Tags and internal links: Review the new site’s H1 tags and internal linking structure. Ensure that the most important keywords are properly incorporated into the H1 tags and that internal links aren’t pointing to redirected or missing pages.
- Duplicate content and broken pages: Run a crawl of the new site to check for duplicate content and broken pages (404 errors). Search engines penalise sites with duplicate content and broken links, so it’s essential to resolve these issues before launch.
- XML sitemap and website navigation: Ensure that the new XML sitemap is correctly configured and submitted to Google Search Console. Check that the new site’s navigation is user-friendly and easily crawlable by search engines.
- Speed & Core Web Vitals: Test the new website’s speed and other Core Web Vitals using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. A fast-loading site is crucial for both user experience and SEO.
- Mobile friendliness: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to make sure the site is fully responsive and provides a great experience on mobile devices.
- Tracking and analytics: Ensure that your tracking tools (e.g., Google Analytics, heatmaps) are set up and functioning correctly on the new site.
- Indexing and orphan pages: Check that all pages that should be indexed are accessible to search engines, and ensure that no important pages are left orphaned without internal links.
- Noindex tag and robots.txt: A crucial last step is ensuring that nothing is preventing the site from being indexed. Check for accidental “NoIndex” tags or misconfigured robots.txt files that could block search engines from crawling the site.
Post-Launch SEO Checks
After your redesigned site goes live, conduct another SEO audit to verify that everything has been implemented as planned. Post-launch checks should include making sure everything you highlighted above was fixed and the following:
- Indexability: Confirm that all important pages are indexable and appear in Google’s index.
- Submit your XML sitemap: Submitting the updated XML sitemap to Google Search Console ensures that Google quickly finds and indexes your new content.
- Performance monitoring: Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other tools to monitor the site’s performance. Don’t make immediate changes based on short-term data; SEO takes time, and making too many changes too quickly can mask the true cause of any issues.
Being patient is key. Give the new design time to settle, and gather enough data before making additional changes. If you do need to make changes, document them carefully and track the impact of each adjustment.
Is SEO Always Necessary in a Redesign?
Some companies may think, “Our site doesn’t get much SEO traffic, so why bother with SEO during the redesign?” While it may be tempting to skip SEO considerations, this approach can still be risky. A few reasons why:
- PPC Impact: If URLs are changed without redirects, paid search ads may point to broken pages, wasting ad spend.
- Future SEO Growth: Even if SEO isn’t a focus now, neglecting SEO during the redesign can limit your future growth potential if you decide to prioritise organic traffic later. A site built without an SEO foundation is harder to optimise later on.
Real-Life Examples of SEO in Website Redesigns
A Health Website Redesign
After being hit by Google’s Medic Update, this health-related website lost most of its top-10 rankings within weeks. A comprehensive redesign that prioritised SEO helped the site regain its lost traffic by focusing on E–E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trustworthiness) principles and user experience improvements.
A Website Migration
In this case, the website failed to properly redirect hundreds of URLs after a redesign. This resulted in broken pages showing up in Google’s index, leading to a sharp decline in organic traffic. But with some help from our SEO team we were able to right these wrongs and eventually get the traffic back up to where it used to be.
A Common Issue
Many businesses come to us after a redesign or migration asking, “Why did we lose all our organic traffic?” The answer is often a simple, avoidable mistake: a NoIndex tag accidentally left in place or a robots.txt file blocking the entire site from being crawled.
Don’t Let Your Redesign Be an SEO Horror Story!
Redesigning or migrating a website can feel like a fresh new chapter for a business, but without proper SEO planning, it can turn into a nightmare. By making SEO a central part of your redesign strategy, you can avoid the typical pitfalls—like losing traffic, dropping rankings, or breaking your site’s search visibility. Instead, you’ll create a website that not only looks amazing but also performs at its best.
Remember, SEO isn’t just for the short term; it’s an investment in the future growth of your website. Whether you’re revamping your site for a new look or shifting platforms, keeping SEO top of mind ensures you’ll come out stronger on the other side. After all, the last thing you want is to spend all that time and effort on a shiny new website, only to see it vanish from search results!
Article by
Samantha Hops
