The Essential Guide to Redesigning a Website

So you want an updated, fresh, modern and renovated website? But you don’t want to lose your content information, high rankings, and SEO. Trust us, the experience of having a new website is incredible, but it is also risky if not knowing what you are doing for you can lose all your rankings and credibility. Thankfully we are here to help you out getting the new, fresh and contemporary website you desire, at the same time not losing any of your search engines hits. The best way to achieve this is by following this important guide because it will keep your development, marketing and web design team intact. Welcome to The Essential Guide to Redesigning a Website.

Part 1: Pre-launch
1. Make Sure Everyone is in Agreement

Redesigning a site is not easy nor does it take one team to achieve. Because of this, the best way to a triumphant redesign site is by communication. For instance, examine your website objectives / goals and make sure to co-operate and carry the information to the development team as well as the web design team. In doing so there will not be any miscommunication and more importantly, everything will go smoothly according to plan.

2. Indicate Your Website SEO Information

Record and gather all these information before moving forward so that you can compare data before and after the redesign:

• Page authority for each page from Open Site Explorer
• Research the keyword ranking of your site in Bing, Google & Yahoo
• Authorize your domain from Open Site Explorer
• And number of pages indexed in Bing & Google search

Look into your Google Analytics and record these information:

• Most viewed content on the site
• Number of visits
• Bounce rate
• List of high traffic pages

3. Backup, Backup, Backup!

Backup your old pages and site materials. Tools like httrack or webzip are great to download and have to your site. The reason why you want to do this is because if there is any problems, you will have a backup to get back to where you were.

4.Content List

The following are information and content that is very important to your website:

• Meta Titles/Description
• Website Page content
• Image alt tags + title attribute
• Any H1 and other heading tags

So, will you change every information and content to your site? If you said yes you should really reconsider and not do it. The reason is because some of them may be the reason why your site is high-ranking in search engines. And if you move these pages, there are chances you are going to lose their SEO benefits. However, if you still want to go with the change, it is better to upgrade the content with relevant phrases rather than changing it completely. This will only improve your rankings in search engines. After or even if you not are sure what to do, be sure to find your top performing pages on your website. To do so follow these steps:

• Use Google Analytics to pinpoint pages that bring the most traffic to your site. Extract and download the .csv for those.
• Use Opensiteexplorer.com to spot and extract top performing pages on your site.
• Put all the page URLs responsible for your site ranking in one sheet.
• Now, extract a list of those so that even if redirected, it will not affect the website SEO.

6. Design List

Throughly look into your design overall, in other words check the details that are in your images, content formatting and responsiveness by:

• Checking your website resolutions. Such as viewing the website on your desktop, phone and tablet screens. In other words, check how the site is shown in different resolutions to see if it renders correctly or not.
• Look how your website is display in different web browsers such as Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.
• Check font sizes, image sizes, blank space and alignments.
• Make sure your images are compressed.

Part II: Before It Goes Live
7. Test Your Forms

• Validate the information submitted by a site visitor. Is it working?
• Does the form notify both the customer and company with all the user information?
• Is there a “Thank You” message right after the form is filled successfully.

8. Check Your Links

• Find out if all internal links and external links are working. And be aware if 404s, invalid links, or anything in between are functionally correctly.
• Are your social media icons linking correctly. You don’t want to someone to click your Facebook icon to than take them to your YouTube page. Doing so will show your site is not professional.

9. Proofread Your Text Content

Make sure to check for any typos, grammar errors, missing meta titles, descriptions and image alt tags. Doing all these will give the search engines a better understanding of where to find you and place your site on their engines.

Part III: ITs Live!… Now what?
11. Set up Google Analytics

• Get the analytics code and add it to your sites header
• Record the date of launch in Google Analytics
• Verify if Google Analytics is collecting data. To do so, simply open your site & see if the Real Time reports are working.
• Lastly, use Google Analytics filters to eliminate spam visits, your company IP address, and anything else that will corrupt your data

12. Test Your Web Page Speed

Do a speed test with Google Pagespeed Insights to ensure your webpage is not slow. Because after all, no one wants to wait as the page is buffering or downloading. The point of all websites is to be shown fast and easy, any interference or slow time will make viewers leave your site.

All in all, take part of all these guidelines and your new redesign website will be successful. More importantly, your site will get more hits and become higher rank than ever before. In addition, make sure to check your Google Analytics is working and collecting data, and always check your website traffic. This all may seem a lot of work to do, but in the end it will be well-worth it for you and your business entirely. We just talk about The Essential Guide to Redesigning a Website, now we want to hear from you. As always, comments and thoughts are always appreciate.
And remember… Elegant Graphics, Exquisite Designs. Welcome to Elegant Graphic Designs!