Best SEO Practices During A Website Redesign
Performing a complete website redesign is a lot of work and a daunting process. Whether you want to keep your existing rankings and targeted search engine traffic, or you are using your redesign process to get started on a new SEO campaign, there are a number of best practices to keep in mind.
The situation: changing URLs / navigation / site architecture
Very often during a website redesign, the backend platform and/or content management system (CMS) will be changing. When that happens, it often means that every page of the website will have a new URL. For instance, if you change from a .asp platform to a .php platform, your URLs will now end in .php instead of .asp which in SEO terms means that the search engines will have completely new URLs to index and all the old URLs that are indexed will no longer be valid.
Even if your URLs don’t change, very often a new navigation scheme and/or site architecture is a necessary part of your redesign. This is generally a good thing, as it can enable you to bring important pages a level higher within the website’s hierarchy, but it too can end up causing your URLs to change.
How to manage it
There are a number of ways to manage this situation and minimize the potential loss of search engine traffic that can arise from it. Which method you choose will depend on your situation as well as your team’s technical knowledge, skills and availability.
If it’s just URL extensions that are changing (like in the example above), very often you can keep the same basic page/file name that your old system was using, and continue to use it within your new system, then set up a permanent 301-redirect on your server from any existing .asp page to go to its equivalent .php page. The key is advance planning, so that your new system can be set up this way from the start.
If your new page URLs must be completely different than your old URLs due to your new backend platform, you could redirect each URL manually to its most equivalent new counterpart. This is doable for say 20-50 URLs, but could get quite tedious for more than that, so it’s always best to try to automate it as much as possible.
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