Why Your SEO Rankings Dropped After Your Website Redesign

‘0.5 Seconds’ – That’s the time your website users take to decide in they are in or out of your website i.e. they are ready with their opinion within merely 50 milliseconds. Judgemental much you think? Still, you can’t change this mindset (users have too many other options), so you need to adapt accordingly to prevent losing your users. There may be any number of reasons for you to get your Website redesigned such as to improve Functionality, flexibility, security, usability, lead, SEO, or even site performance. Sometimes you may have a very simple reason such as wanting to redesign your website to follow the latest trend (I suggest you go for a simple design update instead of full-fledged redesigning in such case). Whatever the reason, there is a perquisite which you need to consider while taking this big step – you need to have in place a transition plan. Else, your SEO Ranking Factors may get affected, and you’ll see a drop in your SEO ranking.

Please take note that your transition plan needs to do Redesigning SEO, and even after that, redesigning may result in your SEO Rankings dropped at least temporarily. Now you may say that if we are redesigning to improve our Websites performance, why will it cause the opposite? Well, as said earlier, it’s temporary, as to the reasons for the drop, I am mentioning below them below.

No 301 Redirects: When you redesign your website, it becomes important to redirect the users to your new and improved page. 301 Redirect should be your correct choice. It is tells the users as well as Google crawlers – look, this is the new page in-place of the old! So, the google crawlers know that they now have to rank the new page. Now here it becomes important that the new page is similar to the old one, and the redirect leads to that very page. If there is some error with your redirect, or if 301 Redirects are not implemented, your old pages will be simply dropped out. The crawlers then won’t land on the new page, thereby reducing your ranking. 

The Broken links: When you redesign your website, if there is change in your URL, your backlinks (or inbound links) will be broken. Of course, if there are proper 301 redirects in place, users will arrive at your new page; however, direct backlinks are always preferable as compared to redirect links. This is again going to affect your So, instead of redirect, you take out a bit of time and send requests to the websites which are back-linking to your website and get your backlinks updated.

The 404 Page Not Found: Sometimes it happens that when you redesign your website, you decide to forgo some pages which were analysed to be not driving traffic in, or some other reason. However, what happens is that you end up removing a page or two. Removed pages shows Error 404 Page Not Found. While SEO optimizes individual keywords and the whole website doesn’t rank for keyword, your website can have many pages with similar keywords theme. All the keywords within your website thus tell the story of your site. Thus, if one of the web pages is removed, a gap is created within the content sets and content topics. This may be injurious to your SEO ranking.

The Copy Change: Disclaimer – when I say change in the copy, I don’t mean a few minor changes, but major changes. When you get your site redesigned, you also tend to change the content within so that it stays true to the new design. However, there are already some web pages on your website which are driving in great traffic and bringing in good conversions. It is better to keep the content for such web pages much similar to the original, without any bigger changes. After all, content is one of the most important SEO Ranking Factors so that it’s important for your website to retain the copy which is of high quality and got you higher rankings

Re-organized Site architecture: The structure of your site decides how Google crawlers understand your website. If you make major changes to the hierarchy of your website, it’ll inadvertently lead to a completely new sitemap. Your original website must have some pages with more internal links (which by the way is an important SEO Ranking Factors), however after redesigning with major changes in the architecture, some important pages may get less internal links. Not only that, but also the web pages on your website which link to such high traffic driving pages may be of lesser values. In short, it may lower your SEO Ranks.

It is said, Prevention is better than cure. If you are getting your website redesigned; you need to take some precautionary steps. It is better to redesign your website with SEO; and it would be best if you first crawled your existing website, and then accordingly redesign your new website with SEO. So, if you are looking for a redesign for your Website, connect with us at Cure SEO. We are a SEO Company in Bangalore and can help you get your redesigned website SEO proofed.