What’s with web design companies obliterating organic traffic on website redesigns?
I won’t name and shame, but they weren’t cheap websites (10k+ and 25k+) and the clients aren’t new businesses with nothing to lose (7 and 8 figure businesses)
The clients haven’t cut corners hiring some cheap contractor, they deserve to have an agency that actually understands the impact a redesign can have on SEO – and mitigate accordingly.
This is the second time in 3 months I’ve been called to find out why sales have fallen off a cliff – after speaking with industry friends it seems it happens all the time these days.
If you’re charging medium to high prices for a website, you can’t act like the website build and SEO are separate things and it’s ‘not your problem’
We calculated these businesses have lost between $1m-$2.5m revenue conservatively from having this problem happen and not realising for a few months.
If you get your website re-done, for the love of God ensure they understand SEO and the impact a new website can have when done wrong.
Things I’ve seen:
- Redirects done for some pages but not all
- Blog section removed entirely
- Removing well-ranking relevant pages
- Redirecting well-ranking pages to pages with much less content
- New site fancier but slower than old site
- Less internal links with new site
A new website doesn’t need to be a disaster if you plan it right and monitor carefully.
How to avoid it happening to you:
- Keep an eye on your website stats each week after launch
- Compare old vs new website load times
- Ensure redirects on all pages
- Make note of the 80/20 of your most popular ranking pages
- Test everything on a staging site before going live
- Be careful not bringing pages across to the new site
- Check for broken links
- Submit updated sitemap to Google
- Keep an eye on Google Search Console for any crawl errors
- Ensure you have a helpful 404 page
Hope that helps
Ray
(This post was first published on the Groe digital marketing agency blog)
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