Switching to a new design is always associated with the risk of losing conversions and a significant portion of traffic. Therefore, it is very important to approach the issue of redesign with all care: draw up a detailed working plan and strictly adhere to it. This is what I did working with a client’s project.
1 Stages of work
In general, the action plan looked like this:
1. Fixing site indicators:
- Traffic stats.
- Positions for keywords.
- Stats on Clicks, Impressions, CTR for TOP pages.
- Device stats: PC / Mobile / Tablet.
2. Checking all technical and SEO parameters of the site:
- Full website audit.
- Creating a backup for quickly roll back changes if a sharp drawdown happens.
3. Full technical audit of the new version of the website:
- Robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
- Site structure (URL).
- Meta tags.
- Images and attributes Alt, Title.
- Analysis of the Home page, Contacts, About, etc.
- Content on pages.
- The structure of the headers H1 – H6.
- Mobile site menu.
- Rel = “canonical” attributes.
- AMP versions.
- Bread crumbs.
- Microdata.
- Checking the main menu and filters on the site.
- Favicon.
- Page 404.
- Download speed.
- Cross-browser compatibility.
- The main site mirror and 301 redirects.
- Optimization for mobile devices.
- HTTPS.
- “Up” button, codes of connected online chats and callback services.
- Checking the performance of all forms, services, scripts that are used on the website.
- Transfer of codes of analytics systems.
2 What was done
- Based on the results of the analysis and verification, the documents with the main stats before the moving were drawn up.
- There were made the technical tasks for correcting issues (as the result of the SEO audit) with the statuses for tasks, deadlines, and comments after double-check.
- In the first weeks after the transfer, I carried out daily monitoring of traffic, positions, tracking messages about new errors in the Google Search Console panel.
- One month after the move, the indicators for traffic, positions, clicks, impressions and CTR were taken again, and a comparison report was generated.
3 Results
It is impossible to completely eliminate the traffic drop and predict the reaction of the search engine to the new design. But with a thoughtful approach, we managed not only to minimize risks, but also to achieve a small increase in the number of visitors.
Traffic statistics for 3 months:
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