How to deal with traffic loss on website redesigning?
Are you experiencing a traffic loss on your website after redesigning it? Don’t worry; you’re not alone. Many website owners face this problem when they give their site a fresh look and feel.
Redesigning a website can be exciting, but it’s important to understand that it can also have negative consequences if not executed properly.
A poorly planned redesign can lead to decreased traffic, ultimately impacting your business’s bottom line. However, with the right strategies and techniques, you can minimize the damage and even turn things around for your website.
In this article, we’ll explore some effective ways how to deal with traffic loss on website redesigning and get your site back on track.
During the first few days following a redesign. It takes Google a little time to scan and index the newly updated websites to provide users with their requested new version of your site—a brief decline in organic traffic results as a result of this situation.
At this point, you should be concerned only if the reduction is greater than 10% and the traffic is reducing significantly. Then, to fully appreciate the situation, you must examine the three components listed below.
Getting an Insight on the traffic drops after a website redesign:
1. Redirects: To check the redirect status, you need to log into Google’s Search Console, go to Crawl > Crawl Errors and select the ‘Not Found’ tab. In this section, you can find the pages without redirects. If you have not set up the proper redirects, it will result in a drastic traffic loss.
2. Site Structure: If you have redesigned your website, 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 website redesign needs to define users’ relevant search results. It becomes possible only if your web pages contain the relevant keywords of your business or service. Page optimisation is crucial in letting your website appear in search results.
A proper SEO strategy during a redesign is the key to avoiding traffic drops.
Having examined the factors contributing to traffic snarls, we will now discuss the strategies that can be used to minimise their occurrence to the greatest extent possible. The amount of traffic to your website will be lower than usual until the structure, online content, and URLs have been properly restructured on your website.
These obstacles provide a critical service to the community. Taking care of the SEO structure of a website when redesigning it is the most important service to provide to avoid traffic drops.
Utilising the below-mentioned steps simultaneously while redesigning will bring positive traffic instead of a slowdown –
Getting adhered to the SEO strategy
The redesign team must adopt a well-proven SEO strategy by contacting an SEO expert. They will guide you to redesign the website as per the SEO trends. You can implement the ideas that can result in improved traffic.
Backing up the existing site
Taking a backup of the whole website is the best job while considering any change on your website. It can help you implement all the valuable information into the redesigned version. If you possess all subfolders and the relevant page titles, you will be able to redesign accordingly, and it will also help you fix the issue if found.
Set up 301 redirects
As we have discussed 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, you should set up a 301 redirect, as this tells the crawlers that the page has been permanently moved.
However, if the page is removed from your website, you should use a 302 redirect, as it tells the crawlers that the page will be available at some point.
Create a new sitemap
Before relaunching the redesigned website, the new sitemap must be noted to let the search engines comprehend your site much better. Doing this at the time of relaunching assists in preserving the traffic, and if the loss happens, it will improve within a couple of days.
Make sure your analytics tracking code is in place
One of the biggest dilemmas that website owners face after redesigning their site is a loss of traffic. This can be due to various reasons, such as poor design, slow loading speed, or lack of search engine optimization (SEO). However, one critical factor that many website owners overlook is the analytics tracking code.
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 being unable to track your site’s performance. Analytics tracking allows you to monitor user behaviour on your site and make necessary changes based on their actions. Without this data, knowing what works and what doesn’t work on your new website will be difficult.
In addition to monitoring user behaviour, analytics tracking also helps identify technical issues such as broken links or missing pages. These issues can negatively impact your SEO ranking and lead to a drop in traffic. Therefore, make sure that all the necessary tracking codes are added before launching your redesigned website to avoid any sudden dilemmas related to traffic loss.