Providing a great website user experience can help you generate tons of high-quality sales leads. As time goes by, the sensibilities and preferences of your audience will start to change. Failing to change your website design in response to these changes can be disastrous for your small business.
A bad user experience can make a potential customer write off your business and seek out the help of a competitor. If you have decided to redesign your existing website, one of the top concerns you should have is not losing the amount of traffic your domain currently receives. Read below for tips on how to launch a redesigned website without losing traffic.
Identify and Inventory Your High-Performing Content
When first starting the website redesign process, you need to perform a thorough audit of your content. This audit will help you figure out which pieces of content are performing the best and which ones need to be tweaked. The content on your website that gets lots of traffic should be protected at all costs. Removing them can lead to your website traffic numbers sharply declining.
You also need to check the inbound links in the content on your current website. Search engines use internal links to gauge the quality of the content on your website. If you remove content from your website, some of the internal links will stop working. This mistake can lead to your website dropping off the first page of Google. This is why you need to minimize the changes to your content during the redesign process.
Update and Improve Your Site Architecture
Once you’ve identified high-performing content, you will need to turn your attention to site architecture. The main goal you should have with your site architecture is laying out your pages in a way that is easy to find for both search engines and website visitors. A successful website will have a structure that makes understanding the relationship between various pages easy for search engines. A good structure will also make understanding which individual pages are important simple.
A confusing site architecture will drive consumers away in droves. If you can’t figure out how to alter the architecture of your new website for success, allowing a web design professional to weigh in is a must.
Make Sure Your New Website is Optimized For Page Speed
Over 47% of online consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less. If a website doesn’t load quickly, an online consumer might get frustrated and leave. As the owner of a website, the main goal you should have is to keep visitors engaged for as long as possible. This is why making sure your new website is fast should be a top priority.
Improving your page load time will require things like file compression, the addition of a content distribution network and minifying your code. The time invested in making these changes will be worth it, considering how fast your new website loads.
By implementing these tips, you can avoid losing valuable search engine traffic after launching your redesigned website.