When it’s the time for your website to change clothes, then it’s better to find an appropriate and suitable attire. You’re up to some serious switches, like redesign or migration? Then remember that the new website should be completely different from the old one. How can it be different? Let’s jump into the details.
Secret Word: Data
Yeah, we know that we’ve written an annoying infinite amount of time about contents and stuff. You may find it irritating or not. Better to not if you do care about your SEO, users, and rankings. Before redesign or CMS migration make sure that you transferred your data to a new website. Not while the process of redesign or migration, and not after the process redesign or migration. Before. Only this way. Try not to forget or throw away any of website’s sections. Some of them make your traffic high, and if such a page or section is erased, then it would be much difficult to restore your previous SEO indicators. Check on your statistics first before getting rid of which what might seem for the first time “useless.”
…And What is the Best Way to Deal With It?
For safe and more comprehensive data moving, try to create a website on a test domain or subdomain and prevent its indexation (in robots.txt doc.) until all the process is completed.
URLs
What about them? Well, first of all, they must be readable and clean. In case your website has a complex organization, URLs should provide all the info about each path and folder. Either way, the requested search item may be not completely displayed.
Which is more attractive?
Meta Tags and Internal Links. What to Do With Them?
Simply don’t forget to transfer. Meta tags provide the complete info about page’s content in HTML format, so it’s strongly recommended to preserve this valuable data. Internal links help navigate and point to other sections on your website. You don’t want your users to get lost in broad daylight.
Redirect Old URLs
Do this with the help of 301 redirect which informs search engine and users that your website with its contents has moved to the new URL. Try to redirect each page of your old website to the new one.
Say Farewell to Your Previous Site
Don’t forget to shut down your old website to avoid duplicates (sites with identical contents but different URLs). This would confuse your users and traffic.
Choose Wisely
Choose wisely what? A CMS where you would be able to use all your SEO power. Look for SEO-friendly website building platform, in which it’s possible to write, for instance, title tags meta tags, etc.
Create a New Sitemap File
Your new website will need a new sitemap.xml file since it informs search engines of your URLs which are available for crawling. It’s not recommended to copy a sitemap file for your old site to the new one, as it points to the links on your old website. Sitemap.xml shows: The frequency of updates on your website The dynamism of your website (how often it changes) The most important pages compared to other pages on your website.
Examine Your Website
Crawl your new website to see if there are no 404’s or broken links. After the great move or change of look, your rankings will wave for some time (1-3 weeks), don’t worry. Then you’ll see the real image.
Have you read this? Do the thing then. Redesign your website along with this to-do-list, implementing more new and fresh ideas. Want to increase your website’s rates up to 94% or higher? We have one guy in mind. CMS2CMS. The rest you’ll see for yourself.