How to avoid losing traffic when renovating websites?

No matter how good your business website looked when it was new, there will probably be a time when your business website would also benefit from the redesign. For example, due to changes in Google’s algorithms and the ever-changing internet behavior of consumers, it is almost impossible for an outdated website to produce the results you need.

If you’ve recently launched a new website, you’re probably looking forward to seeing the benefits that the new site brings, such as increased traffic, increased conversions, and increased sales. Properly done, website reform should bring, among other things, the benefits mentioned above. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Some websites lose either some or almost all of the traffic to their site after the new website is launched.

If you have this problem, keep reading and I'll tell you three possible reasons for it and ways to fix it.

Reasons for the decrease in traffic

It’s important to start by mentioning that a small decrease in traffic is perfectly normal with the launch of a new site. If the time has passed less than a month and traffic has dropped less than 10% you hardly have to worry. Google needs time to crawl your new site and crawl new pages.

Redirects

Redirects are one of the most important steps in launching a new website. Failure to redirect is perhaps the most common reason for a drop in website traffic. URLs must be identical to the new and old sites. If the URLs don't match, the old URLs must be redirected to the new URLs so that search engines can match the old landing pages and the visibility they accrue to the new ones.

Did the address structure of your site change, but you didn't make the necessary redirects? This is probably the biggest reason for your site traffic to plummet.

Site structure

The structure of your site and the hierarchy of pages play an important role in Google's efforts to crawl and understand your site. It's a good idea to make a sitemap for your new website. It lists all the individual pages on your website and their relationships. You should also go through the internal links on your site and check for broken links. Internal links on your site play a big role in how Google crawls your site.

Site Content

Sometimes when a website is renewed, the textual content there is completely rewritten. The content producer should be aware of the keywords used in the text on the old site and use the selected keywords in the new content as well. In many cases, if the text is not written by a content provider, it does not take search engine visibility into account in any way. Your site's rankings with the original keywords will suffer if those words aren't used in the new text content.

How long does it take for traffic to return to normal?

If the collapse of your traffic is due to the problems I mentioned above, they should be fixed as soon as possible. The lost traffic will not return to your site in an instant, and it may take weeks for Google to crawl your site and re-index your pages. Your traffic will be lower than usual until your pages return to their old positions in the search results.

How do I consider search engine visibility when designing a new site?

When you start redesigning your homepage, make sure the authors of your new site consider at least the following:

Make search engine optimization part of the process

Make sure the team that makes your website either has enough knowledge about search engine optimization (SEO) or that they regularly consult a search engine optimization professional when designing a website. Even if the company that makes your website has top experts in design and coding, they may not have enough knowledge about search engine optimization. Consulting an SEO professional will help you avoid the worst pitfalls that will cause a collapse in traffic.

Go through your site and design a new site structure

There are a lot of tools to go through the URL structure of your site and upload it as a CSV file to your computer, for example. This is one way to recover the old structure and ensure that all the information on the current site can be transferred to the new site without losing it.

In some cases, the address structure of a new site may remain exactly the same as that of the old site. However, a site redesign is a good opportunity to redesign the address structure if it is not logical.

Make 301 redirects

As I mentioned earlier, the lack of 301 redirects is certainly one of the biggest reasons for the loss of traffic. Redirects must be 301 redirects (permanent redirect). This tells the search engines that the address has been permanently changed to a new one. Using 302 redirects (temporary redirects) is a common mistake that can hurt your pages' search rankings.

Make a sitemap

A Sitemap is a list of subpages of your site that helps search engines understand how your site's content is organized. If you're using a content management system like WordPress, the easiest way to create a Sitemap is to use the Yoast-SEO plug-in, for example. It will automatically generate a Sitemap, after which you may want to submit it to the Google Search Console to speed up the indexing of your site.

Add the Analytics tracking code

The final tip is to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your site. Google Analytics is a free tool for tracking website traffic. It allows you to see where people are coming to your site and what they are doing there. If you've had Google Analytics on your old site, it's possible that the Analytics tracking code has not been added to your new site. The missing tracking code appears in Google's dashboard as a loss of traffic, even if it may not have been lost.