In the same way that you could occasionally feel the need to go out and buy a new hat or coat to update your look, you could also sometimes consider a redesign of your website necessary. It can certainly help to revive or maintain visitors’ interest in your website, but it can also, if you aren’t careful, lead to several SEO issues that adversely affect your website’s visibility in SERPs. Here is some advice for helping to prevent or minimize negative promotional effects of a redesign to your website.

Make sure that data is safe and URL changes are accounted for

Before the redesign even occurs, backup the website’s pages and content to help mitigate the effects of any inadvertent disaster during the redesign process, which should be completed before you cancel any hosting plan that you use for backing up. You should also consider that, during a redesign, there could be changes to page URLs – even if the website isn’t being moved to a new domain. Such changes can result in individual pages losing their search rankings, so remember to let search engines know of these changes in page URLs. Here’s to a stress-free – as far as possible, at least – redesign…