How to deal with traffic loss on website redesigning?
Website redesigning is a requirement of the time to be compliant with the always-changing market algorithms.
A user does not want to spend their entire time on a website that is out of the current. In terms of SEO, an out-of-date website has a poor search result appearance and receives few visitors.
Following your website redesign to reflect current web trends, you will see a significant boost in visitors to your site. This is not always the case, as not all sites have the exact same requirements. Some websites have experienced a drop in web traffic immediately following their redesign, which is a documented fact.
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 if 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 just need to log into Google’s Search Console, 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, 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.
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
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. You only need to implement the code in the header or footer section to monitor the traffic.
