Overview

Redesigning a website can provide many benefits for a business, including better user experience and increased brand credibility and conversions. A website redesign can also increase traffic; however, without a proper SEO strategy, website redesign services can negatively impact a website’s existing organic traffic and valuable backlinks.

Whether a website is built using WordPress or custom development, a successful redesign requires protecting a website’s existing SEO and helping a website prepare for future SEO growth.

At Ranks Growth, we offer strategic website redesign services and integrate technical SEO and performance-focused development to assist clients in creating modern websites without impacting search visibility.

We can migrate URLs while retaining all of your website’s content. We’ll help you optimize your website for user experience and the Website’s Core Web Vitals. We take all of the important details of a redesign into account.

Get a Free Quote

If you are looking to upgrade your website, our team of technical SEO and development specialists can give you a migration strategy to protect your existing rankings. You will also receive a Free Redesign SEO Audit to see what you can improve and where you have opportunities to increase your website’s performance. 

Introduction

Potential customers will usually look at your website before deciding to engage with your business. Bad design and an inferior user experience will affect your bottom line by reducing customer trust and affecting conversions.

Redesigning a website also means resolving issues that stem from user experience and design. SEO can be negatively affected by even the most minor design and layout changes.

The best way to improve a website is by making changes that improve usability and performance while still satisfying Google and other search engines. However, changes that satisfy design requirements may adversely affect search engine rankings and make some user experience and design changes necessary.

There are several other considerations during a redesign including the importance of Core Web Vitals, the role of https, if changes will negatively impact SEO, balancing design with performance requirements, and many other considerations.

Improving and satisfying these factors will help improve usability, site performance, and rankings in the long term.

How to Redesign a Website Without Losing Google Rankings

Step 1: Audit Your Existing Website Before Making Changes

First, determine how your site performs in search engines. Look at Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and SEO platforms, and find your strongest pages.

Focus on:

• Pages getting organic traffic.
• Keywords with impressions and click-through rate.
• Important backlinks.
• Pages in the index and the sitemap.
• Converting and engaging pages.
• Technical issues, like broken links and duplicate content.

Performing a website audit addresses the above issues. Before deleting a page because it doesn’t fit the design, consider how it performs from a technical and user standpoint. Often, pages that look unrelated to a design actually support a website from a technical and user perspective.

Step 2: Choose Between WordPress and Custom Development

Correct implementation of either approach can positively impact Google rankings. The choice should depend on the needs of your business, the complexity of your site, and the maintenance of your site in the future.

WordPress Development

WordPress is great for business and personal sites because of its themes, plugins, and overall content management and SEO friendliness.

Some advantages:

• It makes content management and publishing easier.
• Gives more flexibility with SEO.
• Has plugins for website performance and security.
• Reduces development and maintenance complexity for several projects.

But there are disadvantages. Poorly coded themes and the use of too many plugins can slow your site down.

Custom Development

If a client’s site has a large number of integrations or needs a lot of customizations, then custom development will be the better route to go because it allows a lot more control over the site’s features, user experience, and website architecture.

Also advantages:

• Functionalities can be completely customized.
• Technical architecture and performance can be completely controlled and customized.
• Development can be completely aligned to a client’s requirements.
• But some SEO features must be implemented correctly, like metadata and XML sitemaps.

A professional web design company should be recommending the right technology for a client based on the client’s goals, not recommending a platform just because it is the trending one.

Step 3: Protect Existing URLs and Backlinks

Many site owners find that their pages no longer rank after a site redesign. Often, this is due to poor management of URLs.

When the URL of a page has changed, ensure that you have a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new. This instructs visitors and search engines about the new location while avoiding a loss of rankings and traffic.

Before relaunching your site,

Compile a list of all the URLs currently in use.

Create a table that shows the relationships between old and new URLs.

Avoid changing a URL unless absolutely necessary.

Update internal links.

For links that you cannot control, that is, backlinks to your site, consider whether it is possible to contact the site owner and ask for the backlink to be changed to point to the new location.

It is also important to avoid broken and circuitous (multiple redirects) links.

A 301 redirect should be used only if it is possible to determine what content should be in the place of the original content.

Step 4: Preserve and Improve On-Page SEO

A redesign should not remove the elements that help search engines understand your pages.

Preserve and review:

SEO titles and meta descriptions.

• H1, H2, and H3 heading structures.
• Primary and secondary keyword targeting.
• Image alt text and descriptive filenames.
• Contextual internal links.
• Canonical tags and structured data.

Content should also be reviewed for accuracy, relevance, and search intent. If you improve existing content, retain the information that contributes to its current visibility.

Strong website design services should integrate content strategy and SEO requirements into the development process instead of treating optimization as a final step.

Step 5: Optimize Core Web Vitals and Website Speed

Beauty isn’t everything. A pretty website means nothing if it loads slowly, has unexpected layout shifts, or has slow user interaction.

There are three aspects of user experience (as measured by the Core Web Vitals) that seriously impact your user experience, your SEO and your business.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Achieve a loading score of 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Achieve a responsiveness score of 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Achieve a visual stability score of 0.1 or less.

You can improve these scores by using caching, image compression, efficient web hosting and the implementation of a content delivery network (CDN).

You should also test the pages you feel are the most important (both mobile and desktop) before you go live.

PageSpeed Insights can help identify issues and opportunities.

Step 6: Check Indexing, Technical SEO & Schema Markup

Make sure important pages of your site can be crawled and indexed by search engines.

Review and test your robots.txt file and XML sitemap. Also test your HTTPS configurations, canonical tags, meta robots directives, and mobile friendliness.

Use Schema Markup to provide search engines with additional info about your Organization, Local Business, Product or Articles to help with rankings and user understanding.

For AEO and GEO, make improvements that present information in a clear and descriptive manner with useful FAQs and authoritative answers. These changes increase the likelihood that the info is understood by search engines and AI-powered tools.

Step 7: Monitor Rankings After Launch

After the redesign, continue monitoring your rankings. Your SEO work doesn’t end there.

Google Search Console shows indexing changes, crawl errors, ranking changes, and clicks. Compare it to your Analytics 4 (GA4) data and identify any discrepancies.

In the first few weeks post-launch, monitor your rankings, backlinks, and site speed. Verify your important pages, check your conversion tracking, and ensure your redirects are working.

A strong team will consist of both a creative design agency and a trusted SEO team to align design and development with search performance.

Contact Ranks Growth Today

The right redesign can help you regain your competitive edge without risking the years of progress you made with SEO.

Our website design team is able to improve your existing site or redesign your entire site from the ground up. While doing so, we work to protect your site’s search visibility.

Contact us to get a Free Redesign SEO Audit.

Whether you need a full website redesign or some changes to your existing website, we protect your search engine visibility while building a website that is designed for your business to grow.

Contact us today!

FAQs

Will a website redesign affect rankings on Google?

Yes, changes to URLs, content, links, meta data and how pages are indexed can impact rankings. Risks to rankings can be lessened with proper planning during the website redesign process, and checks to ensure SEO standards are met.

Is WordPress better than custom development for SEO?

WordPress does not necessarily provide better rankings than custom development. WordPress can offer better management of SEO, while custom development provides the ability to implement any changes desired.

How can I protect backlinks during a redesign?

Identify backlinks and maintain destination pages. Once destination pages and URLs are defined, implement 301 redirects. After the changes are made, check internal links, and valuable backlinks.

What are Core Web Vitals?

This is Google’s terminology to describe loading, interaction, and visual stability.

Should SEO be integrated during a redesign?

Yes, this should happen during planning before any design or development work occurs. This helps maintain website rankings, backlinks and architecture.

How long will it take to recover rankings?

This depends on how long it takes search engines to crawl and process the changes made. How long it takes to recover can be impacted by how severe issues are, and how quickly they are corrected.