How to redesign or create a new website without losing traffic from search engines

It is advisable to conduct an analysis of organic traffic and include activities in the website redesign that will ensure the retention of traffic and revenue from search engines, or even increase them. This can be achieved through website adjustments, but unfortunately, the reality is often the opposite.

What is the difference between website redesign and creating a new website, and what are their impacts

It is necessary to clarify the term website redesign. Nowadays, the vast majority of companies or organizations already have a website; only the biggest laggards or newly established entities are acquiring one. Existing websites occasionally need innovation — this is often referred to as redesign. Redesign can take various forms, from minor adjustments to significant changes, or even the realization of an entirely new website. Yet, most people still refer to it as redesign.

If you plan only minor adjustments to elements on individual pages, you likely do not need to worry about losing traffic. However, if you will be altering the structure of the pages, creating entirely new pages, removing others, significantly changing texts and design, your traffic is at risk. At the moment when it is not feasible to make the necessary changes to the existing website and you need to replace it with a new solution, your vigilance should be at its highest level.

Analysis of organic traffic as the first step

The first step is to analyze traffic from internet search engines (SEO analysis), specifically the pages that your visitors come to from search engines. The notion that everyone enters your website through the homepage is a misconception. For typical websites, the share of the homepage is about one-third; the remaining two-thirds of users will first visit one of the subpages. Therefore, these pages carry value that you must protect. The analysis does not need to be overly robust; the goal is to map the pages that bring you the majority of relevant users.

Is a redirect enough, or is it necessary to keep the URL?

The next step is to get these pages onto the new website, preferably with the original URL. Changing the URL signals to search engines that the original no longer exists and should be removed from their search results. There is a solution called a redirect (via protocol 301). This tells the search engine not to delete the old URL but to replace it with the new one that the protocol directs to.

However, this only resolves part of the issues — a user who has the original address in their browsing history or in an email and clicks on it after some time will reach the new page and will hardly notice anything different. This traffic is therefore not lost. However, the search engine will remove the original page from its index, even though it knows there is a successor. While it transfers some value from backlinks, it will only determine the new position over time - this process takes time, and there is no guarantee that the page will return to its original position.

For example — if your website was in the ninth position for a keyword on the first page and Google ranks the new page in position number 11 — it seems like a minimal difference, but you are now on the second page of search results, which only a fraction of searchers look at. This means a drop in your traffic. And that is exactly what we want to avoid...

Therefore, the effort to maintain URLs makes a lot of sense, even though it can often cause various technical difficulties, may not look nice, and often the structure of the URL does not correspond to its placement within the website. But that does not bother the average user.

Also pay attention to the content of the pages and metadata

Preserving the URLs does not end the work. It is necessary to ensure that the content on the pages remains roughly the same as before the redesign, so that there is no risk of a drop in the page's position in search results due to Google or Seznam lowering the page's relevance rating for the given keyword.

If you need to significantly change the content of the page, it is better not to redirect the original page to the new one and leave it in "404 - page not found" mode. A search engine would consider redirecting to a page with different informational value as misleading; it would much more readily find a new quality page corresponding to the classification of keywords relevant to its content.

And by content, we mean not only the text itself but also headings and subheadings. Pay special attention to metadata, such as titles and meta descriptions of the pages, which search engines heavily rely on and which are usually displayed to users in search results. If you were to forget to update them in the changed website or significantly alter the text, it could also harm you. The search engine robot would take different pieces of text from the page's content that it deems most relevant to the user's entered keyword, but such automatically generated metadata usually does not have a high click-through rate.

We are in the final stretch

Below we bring you several tips — what to remember and what to check before launching your website or e-shop.

• Check preserved URLs and redirect old URLs to new ones (via 301).
• Update sitemap.xml in Google Search Console.
• Verify that Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager tracking codes are correctly set up. Don’t forget e-commerce for Google Analytics and update events in Google Tag Manager.
• Check mandatory pages — terms and conditions, GDPR (cookies), return policy, and similar.
• Ensure indexing is allowed in robots.txt and meta data.
• Check users with access to the live version of the website (most users had full permissions during testing, but this is usually not the case in the live version).
• Verify that there is a current backup of both the old and new website/e-shop.
• Check that user registration is possible (if this function is implemented), that orders can be placed, and that card payments can be made (if online payment is integrated). Also check follow-up status emails (order confirmation, payment confirmation, invoice, etc.).
• Check for errors in website speed — https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ — and adjust everything that can be improved.
• Make a note of the launch of the new version in Google Analytics.
• Check the implementation of scripts for individual language versions.
• Verify contact forms.
• Check the content of meta data (including OG meta data for social networks).
• Update links in all external communications (including email signatures and advertising campaigns).
• Check all transactional emails. Ensure that content is generated correctly and that they are being sent.
• Check product behavior during unavailability (whether they can be ordered, what is displayed during the purchasing process, what is stated in the transactional email).
• Ensure that 404 errors are tracked — check the status of 404 errors after a few days and actively monitor them for at least the next three months. Then set up an alert in Google Analytics that will send a notification if their number spikes.
• Check how and whether orders flow from the e-shop to the accounting and inventory system.
• Verify the correct formatting of the XML feed (you can use the tool at the URL https://audit.mergado.com/).
• Check the content of robots.txt and sitemap.xml.

Once you launch the website, monitor and process the following:

• Positions in Google Search Console. A drop may indicate errors in migrating the old website to the new one.
• Organic CTR in Google Search Console. A decline may indicate issues with the new metadata.
• Number of 404 errors. Regularly add these to the redirect table. Prioritize based on the frequency of 404 occurrences. The presence of 404 errors indicates that you have not redirected all active URLs from the old website (e-shop) to the new one.
• Conversion path — check if the conversion funnel is significantly worsening. This would indicate that your visitors are having trouble completing the conversion.
• Number of conversions and events in Google Analytics. A significant drop may indicate poorly configured analytical tools.
• After launching the new website, it is advisable to implement Hotjar and closely monitor visitor interaction with the new site. Regularly evaluate this and set up A/B tests for the new website based on the results (for example, using the free Google Optimize). The goal of testing is to increase the effectiveness of your website or e-shop. Remember to evaluate responsive traffic separately.
• Reach out to some visitors whose contact information you have. Ask them what caught their attention on the new website and what concerns they have. Request that they place an order, check out your products, and find your contact information. Be present and observe how they interact with your website.
• Keep testing.