You have successfully launched your business website. It's running well but after a few months, you need to upgrade or implement some vital modifications to your website as per the evolving need of the business. To get benefited, you need to redesign your website. Redesigning a website is the need of the time to get adhered to the altering market algorithms. No user wants to browse through an outdated site. In terms of SEO, an outdated website has a weak search result appearance and lesser traffic. Once your website gets redesigned as per the ongoing web trends, it shows a tremendous increase in traffic. But this is not the case that always fits the same for all the websites. The fact is that some websites start losing traffic within a few days of website redesign.
However, a minor loss of traffic is spontaneous for a few days after a redesign. In order to bring the new version of your website to the users, Google takes a little time in crawling and indexing the revamped web pages. This results in a temporary decline of organic traffic. At this point, you need to worry only if the decline is more than 10% and the traffic is slowing down exponentially. Then, you need to inspect the below mentioned three elements to understand the issue.
Getting an Insight of the traffic drops after a website redesign-
1. Redirects: To check the redirects status, you just need to login to Google's Search Console, then go to Crawl> Crawl Errors and select the 'Not Found' tab. In this section, you would be able to find the pages without redirects. If you have not set up the proper redirects then it would result in the drastic traffic loss.
2. Site Structure: If you have redesigned your website then, you need to create a new sitemap. The sitemap of a website plays a critical role in indexing all the important pages of your website by Google. The internal site structure also needs to be properly linked with all the pages otherwise these result in sudden traffic loss.
3. Keyword Relevancy: The redesign of the website needs to define the relevant search result of users. It becomes possible only if your web pages contain the relevant keywords of your business or service. Page optimization plays a crucial role in letting your website appear in search results.
A proper SEO strategy during redesign is the key to avoid traffic drops
Now, after considering the responsible aspects of the traffic drops, we would be discussing about the strategies to avoid it to the maximum extent. Hitherto your website structure, web contents and URLs are properly rearranged, the traffic coming to your website will be lower than usual. But there is a key solution of these hindrances. Taking care of the SEO structure of website while redesigning the web pages is the key solution to avoid the traffic drops.
Utilizing the below-mentioned steps simultaneously while redesigning, will bring a positive traffic instead of the slowdown –
1. Getting adhered to the SEO strategy
The redesign team must adopt a well-proven SEO strategy by getting in touch with an SEO expert. He will guide you to redesign the website as per the SEO trends. You will be able to implement the ideas that can result in improved traffic.
2. Backing up existing site
Taking backup of the whole website is the best job while considering any kind of change upon your website. It can help you in implementing all the valuable information to the redesigned version. If you are possessing all subfolders and the relevant page titles, you would be able to redesign accordingly and it will also help you in fixing the issue, if found any.
3. Set up 301 redirects
As we have discussed it earlier, improper redirect results in traffic loss. Each URL of your website must be checked before relaunching your website. If you have removed an URL then you should set up a 301 redirect, as this tells the crawlers that the page has been permanently moved.
4. Create a new sitemap
Before relaunching the redesigned website, the new sitemap should be listed to let the search engines better understand your site. Doing this at the time of relaunching helps in maintaining the traffic and if the loss occurs then it gets improved within a few days.
5. Make sure your analytics tracking code is in place
Just before making your redesigned website live, you must ensure that the analytics tracking code is in place otherwise you will have a sudden dilemma of losing all the traffic. Only you need to simply implement the code in the header or footer section to monitor the traffic.