When debating whether to change your website’s design, an important question to consider is how it will affect your search engine optimization (SEO).
After all, SEO is vital for making sure your site appears as high as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs), and a poor ranking can have a major impact on your traffic levels.
So, Yes, changing Website Designs affects SEO. A lot of website owners think that they can just change their website’s look without considering how it will affect their SEO.
However, the fact is that changing your website’s design can have a positive or negative effect on your SEO depending on how you go about it. Changing your website’s design can affect your SEO, but it all depends on how you go about it.
Why Should A Website Avoid A Complete Redesign?
A website redesign can be a great way to freshen up your online presence and make it more user-friendly.
However, there are some things you should keep in mind before undertaking a complete redesign. Here are four reasons why you should avoid a complete redesign:
Costly
A complete redesign will require new design and development costs, which can quickly add up. If you’re on a tight budget, it may be better to stick with small updates or simply refresh your existing design.
Time Consuming
A comprehensive redesign will take significantly longer than making smaller changes or refreshing your current design. This means your website will be down for an extended period of time, which could hurt your business or brand.
Decreased Traffic and Ranking
You could lose traffic and search engine rankings. If you don’t carefully plan your redirects, you could lose valuable traffic and search engine rankings during the transition to your new site.
This could have a negative impact on your business or brand until everything is back up and running smoothly again.
There’s always the possibility that something could go wrong during the redesign process, resulting in a final product that doesn’t meet your expectations.
If this happens, it would likely cost even more money and time to fix the issues, making a complete redesign even less ideal.
How Does Website Design Change Affect SEO?
Any business that wants to succeed online needs to make sure its website is optimized for search engines. After all, if potential customers can’t find your site, they can’t buy your products or services.
But what many businesses don’t realize is that website design can have a big impact on SEO. Here are a few ways that changing your website’s design can affect your ranking in search results:
1. Navigation
One of the most important elements of a website’s design is its navigation. Search engines take into account how easy it is for users to find their way around a site when determining rankings. So, if your site’s navigation is confusing or hard to use, it could be negatively impacting your SEO.
2. Page Speed
Another important factor that search engines consider when ranking websites is page speed. In today’s fast-paced world, users expect sites to load quickly and aren’t patient enough to wait around for slow ones. If your site takes too long to load, it could hurt your SEO.
3. Mobile-Friendliness
With more and more people using mobile devices to access the internet, it’s important for websites to be designed with them in mind. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it could negatively impact your SEO.
4. Fresh Content
Lastly, search engines love fresh content. If you regularly update your website with new and relevant information, it will help improve your SEO. However, if your site never changes or the information on it becomes outdated, it could hurt your ranking in search results.
As you can see, website design can have a big impact on SEO. If you’re not happy with your current ranking in search results, changing your website’s design may be the answer.
SEO Checklist For Website Redesign
When redesigning your website, it’s important to keep SEO in mind. Here is a checklist of things to consider when redesigning your website with SEO in mind:
- Make sure your URL structure remains the same. If you’re changing your URL structure, make sure you set up 301 redirects so that search engines and users are directed to the new URLs.
- Keep your title tags and meta descriptions consistent with what they were before the redesign. These are important elements for ranking in search results and click-through rates, so you don’t want to change them without good reason.
- Don’t forget to update your robots.txt file! This file tells search engines which pages on your site they should and shouldn’t index, so be sure it’s accurate after a redesign.
- Check for broken links after launching the new design – both internal links on your site and external links to other sites. Broken links can hurt your SEO by making it difficult for search engines to crawl your site properly.
Will Changing The Web Design Affect Google Ranking?
If you’re thinking about making changes to your website, you may be wondering if it will have an impact on your Google ranking.
The good news is that in most cases, your ranking won’t be affected by changes to your website. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule.
One exception is if you make major changes to your website’s structure or URL. If you do this without redirecting old URLs to new ones, Google may temporarily lower your ranking while it re-indexes your site.
However, as long as you set up proper redirects, your ranking should eventually go back to where it was before.
Another exception is if you change the content of your pages drastically. If you used to have a page about “dogs” and then changed it to a page about “cats”, Google may lower your ranking for the “dogs” keyword since that’s no longer relevant to the content on your site.
Again, though, as long as you provide relevant and high-quality content on your new page, your ranking should improve over time.
Overall, then, don’t worry too much about changing things on your website affecting your Google ranking negatively.
In most cases, any temporary drop in rank will be made up for pretty quickly as long as you’ve made sure not to make any major mistakes (like forgetting redirects).
Wrap Up
So, should you undertake a website redesign? The answer is nuanced and depends on your specific circumstances. However, there are some key things to keep in mind when making a decision.
First and foremost, always think about how any changes will affect your SEO ranking. Secondly, make sure that the new design is intuitive and easy for users to navigate. Finally, don’t forget about the importance of branding – ensure that the redesign maintains consistency with your company’s overall look and feel.
By keeping these considerations in mind, you can make sure that your website redesign is successful from both a user experience and SEO standpoint.
