Website Redesign Mistakes You Should Avoid To Protect Your SEO
With the changes in the technology trends, redesigning your website is very important in marketing today. This is to help you keep up with customers preferences and be able to cope with competition. As much as redesigning a website is important, there are a number of things that can go wrong in the process. The mistakes can make the search engines not recognize the website. The authoritative answers to any questions concerning it are thus denied. The following are some of the web design mistakes that can really destroy your search engine optimization.
You May Leave The Development Environment Indexable
There is a wide variety of people handling development environments used for rebuilding. The ways may range from creating a development domain. This domain is strictly for development. Others take precautions that help hide the development environment. Search engines follow the indexes and the links that they find on the way. The same version of the website can be indexed two times. This causes problems to the links and the content too. To correct this, use a URL that is clean and never used before for any website. The step that follows is disallowing all bots. This is followed by setting up index pages that are empty and use passwords. A separate folder for each of the folders that are under development is created. The name of the folder is usually using incomplete words combined together thus making it difficult for them to be identified randomly. They are also configured in order to block bots.
You Can Change The Names Of Images On Well-Ranking Pages
The web designer may not be knowing what they are doing and end up changing the image naming. As a result, the ranking of that page is lost. If you want to redesign your web page, always look or a web designer who has complete knowledge on search engine optimization. This will help you retain or improve your SEO ranking. Inexperienced web designers change your old images to better ones which may be larger in size. The only part where they fail is using names that provides no SEO value. Your page ranking is therefore at stake because an important piece of context that helps rank your page is lost.
Deletion Of Pages Or URL Page Change Without Redirecting Them
This is the biggest mistake that is made by inexperienced web designers. During the process, some of the pages will no longer be needed. They, therefore, end up deleting them while others are renamed and moved. This changes their URLs. These pages might have ranked well and have had inbound links that point to them. The visitors too might have bookmarked these pages. Deletion of such pages results in the loss of SEO and the ranking is lost. It becomes worse a user is greeted with an error page instead of where they were looking to go. This creates a negative impression for the users thus limiting your ranking due to the poor user experience. The best way to delete these pages is redirecting them to the current most relevant pages within the site.
A 301 redirect action is usually used in both situations as it informs the search engine that the old page has been permanently relocated. This is usually executed by adding the accurate entry in your website .htaccess file when it comes to most of the hosting platforms. Your .htaccess file may be hidden and this should be resolved by adjusting the FTP program to reveal the hidden files where it may be located where advanced hosting platforms may do it in a different way due to advanced technology.
Forgetting To Perform Full Crawl After Migration
When the website is ready, it's time to move the site from the development environment to the live host. Some content and pages may consist of links pointing back to the development environment that will no long work in the live environment. Check the website completely for any broken links.
Skipping A Complete Function Check
You should never forget to perform a complete checkup to ascertain everything is alright. This includes checking contact forms, e-commerce functionalities, interactive tools, search capabilities, Analytics, media, dynamics, tracking pixels and any other functionalities of your website. Also, put up a wall between the development environment and the search engines' crawlers as it may cost you a lot and even dropped off from google index.
Forgetting To Reconfigure Extensions, Modules and Plugins
The configurations are vital as you may lose some very important functionalities from within your website. Checking on the extensions is also very important to ensure search engines can check your SEO Sitemaps, Redirection, Schema and Caching.
Forgetting Any Detail That May Seem Small
All these mistakes are not too complicated and very simple to avoid. All it takes is attention and being aware of everything going on during and after a website redesign. Don't skip anything until you are sure you have done it right and prevent hurting your SEO standing.
