If you’re in the process of redesigning your website or replatforming, you want to be aware of making sure you are prepared during the process. So that you don’t see any loss in traffic or drop in traffic fluctuations after the migration happens.
If you’ve ever gone through a website re-design or you’re switching platforms, you may see your traffic drop after the site relaunch. And then eventually it may return back to normal but not back to the pre-migration level.
The reason why that happens is usually because of a broken link or change in the URL structure.
For example, your old URL page slug may have been /about-the-brand now becomes /about-us
Since the old page URL no longer exists. It becomes a broken page or 404.
Broken pages eventually get de-indexed from the Google search results.
Meaning Google removes broken pages from its index so they don’t show up in rankings anymore.
So previously, your /about-the-brand page may be getting 200-300 daily clicks from Google by ranking for various keywords.
When that page is broken, it is removed from the search results.
When a page no longer ranks on Google, all the traffic it used to get from Google disappears too.
To prevent this from happening, you need to do a bit of planning before the launch. It’s very critical this takes place BEFORE the migration happens.
To avoid this you want to:
➡️ Make a list of all page URLs on your current website.
➡️ Make a list of new page URLs you or your web designer will create.
➡️ Create a 301 redirect for pages with the changed URL.
➡️ Keep track of all your redirects.
By doing this will ensure that you don’t experience a massive drop in traffic and rankings.
Hope you found this tutorial to be helpful in being able to avoid some of the problems when you are doing your next website redesign.
Check out my other free tools, trainings and resources:
SEO Ranking Factors Checklist https://info.glynistao.com/seo-checklist
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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chase-your-dreams/id1500443900
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