Tips for avoiding traffic drops after re-designing your website

Refreshing your brand image and creating a new online identity is an essential part of growing a business. In a digital world where trends and styles are constantly changing, it’s vital that your brand can shed its skin and improve. If you’re planning to update or completely overhaul your current website, here are a few tips that will help smoothen the transition and keep traffic up.

Catalogue your existing pages Before jumping into the design process and beginning production on your new website, it’s vital that you go through your existing site and catalogue all of your existing pages. You can find a number of software tools that will do this for you and place the information in a spreadsheet. This allows you to identify and re-use important information or content in order to save time and fix any bugs or problems. Don’t forget about SEO In order to maximise traffic to your website after a re-design, you need to ensure that you’re implementing an effective SEO strategy. If you’re rebuilding your website, you have the perfect opportunity to interweave SEO strategies into the process. Consulting with a professional SEO consultant can help you avoid common mistakes and improve the overall search engine ranking of your new website. Remember, you’ll also need to have a process in place for ongoing optimisation, including the regular addition of new pages to your domain. Use redirects After your new website launches, it may be confusing for existing customers or users to find you. This is where redirects come into play. Whether you’re creating a completely new website or simply re-structuring and re-designing your existing one, it’s vital that you set up any necessary redirects before launching. Be sure to use redirects for any pages that have been retired or renamed. This will ensure your retain the benefit of any previously built external links to those pages for SEO purposes and give users a seamless experience. Create an updated sitemap An updated and accurate sitemap is an essential part of any website and will directly impact usability and navigation. If you’re making changes to your website or creating a new one, make sure that you’re updating or redesigning your sitemap. Search engines like Google use these to understand the structural index of your website so your traffic figures and conversion rate could suffer if you fail to develop an accurate and concise sitemap.