Total Website redesign, what's going to happen to my SERP rankings?

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ks1905

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Nov 29, 2010
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My web page had a redesign 5 years ago and it is now completely outdated. I know that I need a complete redesign to better capture sales

I started doing my own SEO this year and to my surprise I am kicking ass with my rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing but I am not getting the business/leads that I think that I should be.

I'll probably end up hiring a content writer and web designer from the BST forum. My concern is that I'll lose my rankings if I completely redesign my site... Any suggestions on the best way to go about this redesign?
 


Do everything offline first and then go live. If your content gets better in terms of density and if can shove in some LSI material, you should not see any drop. Ofcourse, do not take your own sweet time to upload the new files. Once uploaded, pick up a crash course and go on a link building spree. Social Bookmarking will save the day.
 
Anytime the code of your page changes, be it from new content, a new navigation, etc. you will see a shift in the rankings. It may not be for the particular keyword you are targeting depending on how cemented your rank is due to external linking, but there will be ranking shifts as Google re-evaluates your page vs. others in your niche.

Think over these points, if your answer is yes to any of them, then they need to be something you look at:

  • Does your old site vs your new site have fewer or more pictures?
    • More pictures = increase page load times.
  • Does your old site use a table-based layout vs your new using a table-less layout?
    • Table-based layouts aren't semantic, and often have many more tags to them, which means more code on the page.
    • More code on the page surrounding the content means it's less relevant and also increases page load times.
  • Does your old site or your new site use keyword-rich id, class, and file names?
  • Does your old site vs your new site use more or less heading, strong, em, etc. tags?
Stuff like that is what you need to be looking at. Not all designers keep this kind of stuff in mind, and I would venture to say that even those on WF think about some of my points (and those aren't even all I think about when designing sites, but you should be making those logical leaps because there are a lot of others).

Once the design is out, the designers have done their job. You have to really look at their code and know how to tweak it. If your new design uses less code, has more semantic related items, and keeps the related items on the page closer together than your old site, then you'll come out better.
 
If you are thinking of changing the structure. i.e. moving site.com/page to site.com/articles/page .. then be sure to use a .htaccess file to redirect all the redundant URIs . just saying. :D
 
Thank you for the above answers...I know that I need to plan this properly. I probably need to hire the right person and research the questions to ask them and to make sure that they are doing the proper job.

Question: Should I start adding pages that will be part of the new site and over time, start removing the older pages and then finally replace the home-page with the new home page. A transition over a few months.
 
I have recently doen a job and i just did a straight swap. If the content is the same and you use your .htaccess then all should be good! As has been said... if you improve your markup etc.. then you may see a bost. I can't think of a reason to stagger it.
 
As long as you don't totally change the structure of your site (ie 301'ing all your old urls to new urls) you should be fine. Even then you will probably see less traffic for a few weeks and recover long-term.

I will go very far out of my way to keep an existing site structure/file extension setup as-is to avoid having to redirect any pages, especially those with inbound links pointing to them.
 
^^ probably listen to this guy! The site that i tried, keeping the structure was not really feasible.
 
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