Launching a new website to change your visual identity, to add new products or services could give your business a big boost.
But it could also delay your hard-won SEO efforts if you don’t take the right steps when you launch.
A new website loses, on average, around 5% to 7% of traffic during a redesign.
Main reason? Poorly executed redirects. But not only that. We have listed the main causes.
Clean Broken Links In Error 404 And Missing Images
Determine which pages to move before taking the time to transfer everything to a new site. You may find that you have broken links and 404 errors to dead pages that should not be moved in the first place.
Finding broken links is not that difficult if you use the right SEO tools. Your content management system probably already offers plug-ins for broken link checkers that can significantly reduce your time spent. For example, the Broken Link Checker plug-in for WordPress can analyze your website, repair broken links, and find missing images.
Analyze the performance of your best (and worst) content page
It’s hard to drop poorly performing pages and blog posts after spending months or years meticulously building your content. But in reality, removing a large percentage from your website can actually help improve your site’s ranking.
At the same time, you can save time and effort when you move pages to a new site.
Just a few years ago, it was common to write 500-word blog articles while preserving your Google page ranking. Currently, the best performing content often ranges from 1,000 to 2,400 words. You can actually increase your ranking in Google by abandoning your inefficient content and focusing on a site where the majority of your pages and blogs rich in SEO generate quality traffic.
Test your new pages
Before you start indexing your new site, you need to do some careful testing before you can move the pages. Take a moment to test your pages and posts on your new site and look for broken links. And once you’ve pulled on the redirect, you can delete the index request on your new site.
You can also consider placing a temporary index request on your old site until you are sure you want to log out of your old site. Do not let it stay too long. Otherwise, Google could analyze the two sites and have a negative impact on your internet SEO.
Think About Your Meta Tags And Sitemap
Do not forget to migrate with the content pages, your meta title tags, and your meta description fields, especially if you have already worked with a natural referencing agency in this area. You should also run a sitemap that can crawl all of the pages on your new site and submit it to Google for faster indexing of your site.
Check Your Backlinks
In theory, your redirects should properly send your audience to your new site. But you should also think about your backlinks and make sure that they are also cleaned up moved to your new site.
It is important to watch out for such things as milk on fire. It is easier to recover positions a few days after the site goes online. Noticing a drop in your visibility and therefore, your traffic will be more complicated to recover it after a few weeks.