Will i drop after redesign?

Yurple

Hi,

After doing a lot of work on SEO for the last year, I am very happy with top 3 results on page 1 for all search engines for all our keywords.... We now want to do a total redesign of our website on a different content management system platform but are afraid we will lose our ranking and all our hard SEO work?

How can this be prevented from happening? The website will be redesigned on a different hosting sub domain and then transferred to the current host when its fully completed.

Has anybody any advice to retain our ranking? Thank you very much.

IRE60

Planning would be the best policy here – before you do the redesign.
It all depends on what you are about to change. If you mess about with some of the vitals like your URL’s, or page titles and, most importantly, the content and its presentation, then you may see a fluctuation.
Your CMS per say won’t have any effect on the ranking – it’s what it outputs that will. You should see, on your testing sever/host, how the new CMS will deal with your current content. Will it change the URL’s, titles etc. Joomla, for example, appends a number on to its URL’s so you’d have to look out for that sort of thing.
I genuinely believe that there is always a bit of movement in these circumstances. If your site is of good quality, worthwhile, informative etc – then it should return to it place in time. But try and make the changes as smooth as possible

Yurple

Thank you very much for your reply. I will keep the on-page SEO exactly the same. Im just worried as the website will be offline for several hours but im sure that wont affect a crawl.

Thanks!

TsuDhoNimh

Yurple wrote: »

Im just worried as the website will be offline for several hours but im sure that wont affect a crawl.

It's not ideal, but it wouldn't be a 'major' problem. Still, best to avoid it if possible... which it should be (either directly or indirectly).

Why do you feel the site will be offline for hours? It will require a little downtime, but it shouldn't be (near) that long.

If the potential crawl issues are your major concern, you can adjust the crawl settings via both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Just be sure to remove the changes again once the new site has been launched.

IRE60 wrote: »

I genuinely believe that there is always a bit of movement in these circumstances. If your site is of good quality, worthwhile, informative etc – then it should return to it place in time. But try and make the changes as smooth as possible

Completely agree.

There will always be a little fluctuation (even if it might go unnoticed from a SERP point of view) when making changes like this. The hope is that the positive impacts outweigh the negative, but it isn't always the case.

If you were simply changing the design, so the presentation and layout of pages, it would have the potential to cause some movement in and of itself. The layout of a page and the placement of links within it have a small impact on the weightings of the various links, so could end up with a slight redistribution of your internal link authority. Combine this with the potential for changes due to a tweak of your navigation links, any (even minor) changes to site architecture) and the hundreds of other minor changes that will occur and it's easy to see how a slight fluctuation would occur.

If you were simply changing the CMS, without a design change, it also has the potential to cause a few minor changes. If the new CMS provides either a faster or slower load time, if it causes previously unencountered crawl issues (keep a close eye on your WMT account both pre and post changes, and for a time after the changes) or if it (or you) fails to transfer over a previously forgotten SEO tweak these can all have an impact.

When you change both at the same time, even while retaining all of your existing onpage SEO, there certainly is the room for a bit of movement there.

In general, you shouldn't be too worried about it. If you're retaining all of the existing onpage tweaks, not changing the existing URL structure and taking the time to consider the potential impact of the changes then the chances are you won't find anything too dramatic happening. In the long run you'd hope that the improvements of the site redesign will be more than worth the cost of any minor hiccup that might happen in the short term.

IRE60

OK that’s slightly different because of the downtime: two thoughts on this. If I migrate a site to a different CMS I do something along the following – you will be down for a very short bit, which wont be too much bother to search engines.

I do all the config etc on a server that’s unavailable to anyone bar me and test it on the web (secured) until I’m happy.

Then I move the lot to my live site into a directory (for example) called “_newsite” – the “_” means when its directory is listed the new folder is the very first one.

Now create another folder called _oldsite and do the next bit really rapidly - best practice would be to redirect traffic via you htaccess to holding page –a down for maintenance page.

Anyway: Highlight everything in the root directory bar the two _folders. Then drag the contents of the root into _oldsite. When that’s done the root should have nothing but the two _ folders. Now go into _newsite and highlight all the contents therein and copy them to the root. Copy them keeping the originals in that folder.

Now your new files are at the root and the old files are all intact in the _oldsite.
Test that new CMS. If it is iok – then you’re laughing and its time for beer. If it’s not – no panic- you can simply erase the new files and replace them with the original files in the _oldsite.

The reason to copy the new site to the folder first it that it’s the time consuming part and once in the folder you can make sure that all’s ok by going to www.mysite.ie/_newsite .

Oh did I mention to backup everything first!

If you are in a position that you have to take the site down – then web servers allow for this and Search engines understand the following concept: it’s a 503 page. It there for exactly this eventuality and tells search engines that you are down for (more than a few minutes) maintenance. You can actually specify on the redirect when the crawlers should return (when you think you'll be back)

Here’s the official line:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ie/2011/01/how-to-deal-with-planned-site-downtime.html

Best of luck planning with that!


C

fc2060

I moved my site four years ago to a different CMS (magento) and hosting company. I think Google gets worried when you make dramatic changes. Our traffic dropped for about three months but eventually came back.

In my opinion the most important thing in any change is to make sure that if you have to change the URLs is that you make sure that all the old URLS are redirected to the new ones.

Fred

Yurple

Thanks everyone for the advice and help!