The main site redesigning goal is to retain the old site rankings, and also to enhance the organic traffic and SEO of newly designed pages. You will need to clearly understand how web designing and SEO work together. It will help to plan your site migration carefully, so everything gets done perfectly. Ultimately, traffic and rankings get retained or improved.
Unfortunately, after site redesigns, organic traffic dampens, which means slow sales conversions. Therefore it is essential to identify the culprit that caused traffic loss. You must learn how to redirect WordPress, before doing any changes. WP 301 plugin is a great redirect tool, try it!
How to diagnose website design errors and fix them?
Gather information from –
- Google Analytics
- Date of launch
- Google Search Console
- Historic URLs
- Website URL
- Popular keyword rankings
Confirmation
Review the traffic using Google analytics & search console from the day organic traffic started to drop, after the newly redesigned site got launched. The drop can be slow or sudden. There are even different channels to review, along with organic traffic drop. If other channels are not relatively affected, then it is a redesign glitch. You can confirm the date when traffic dropped by using Google search control & keyword ranking tools.
Comprehend the losses
Understanding the cause of losses on pages and keywords ranking, will help to analyze and remediate. Compare the before & after traffic on the landing page by using Google analytics. If it has been a few weeks since migration, then comparing it with the period before, allows you to see the pages that were attracting more traffic.
The worst scenario is when pages present on the original site did not get created during the redesigning process, means it is a technical glitch. Historic ranking data helps to gain an insight into several key sections where positions could have got lost.
Usual suspects
- Redirects – A common issue is the misconfiguration of redirects. Therefore, while launching the revamped website ensure to keep URLs same and execute 301 redirects from the old link to a new URL. Test the redirects using the crawler tool. Make sure that 301 are used and not the temporary 302 redirects. Check for 404s, if any, and check all crucial redirects.
- Pages have gone missing – The best-performing contents have gone missing, which means ranking gets affected. Ensure that content with high traffic gets redirected correctly, because if they get transferred to a generic page or 404s, then there will be an issue.
- Protocol & domain problem – You can modify protocols [https], domain, or subdomain [www], then redirect for changes needs to be considered carefully while redesigning.
- Technical problem – Technical optimization is essential when a site reveals the error in crawling, indexation, canonical URLs, and more. A total website audit needs to be done to ensure optimistic technical SEO.
- Optimization troubles – Optimization may not get transferred from old to new. You can see the same title on every page along with other basics, if not done correctly, or not. You will need to audit your website to ensure that the basics are properly executed.
After checking everything, and if you still find traffic is lost, make sure to see if analytics are configured correctly. Also check if there was any algorithm change when you launched the new site, or if there is any security problem like hacking that is impacting your site traffic.
Plan carefully and get your SEO back on track! If you face major issues with your WP blog or site, then you will need to use the advanced reset for WordPress and then upload the pages again with proper mapping.