Website designs redo or simply website redesign is a common practice followed by every successful e-commerce business. Even the most robust and aesthetically designed websites need an overhaul after the due time and in fact, a website redesign can benefit business big time. Remember, search engines are pretty periodic in updating algorithms and you need to keep website designs at par with newer algorithms in order to attain top ratings over search engines.
The only problem here is how to minimize the traffic lost after website redesign? Search engine algorithms have gotten complex manifolds and any significant change to a website design will lower website ratings on search engines for sure.
If you are one of those recent sufferers who experience a continual drop in traffic volume, continue to read-on as we list 2 possible reasons that might be hurting the traffic volume to your site.
Why are you getting lower traffic volume after website redesign?
Before we began listing reasons that might be hurting your website’s traffic volume, it is important to remember that low to moderate fluctuations in traffic volume is completely normal. Search engines algorithms have gotten weird to say the least and it is almost impossible to continuously retain the top spot for your target keyword. Thereby, for traffic volume fluctuations quantifying to 10% increase or decrease, you need not bother about.
The reason for this expected fluctuation after website redesign is the time required for the search engine crawler to crawl and index through your website pages. Indexing complete pages of a redesigned website might take some time and you can expect the lower volume of traffic for an initial week after the redesign.
Temporary and small fall in traffic volume might not be the case with all website redesign projects. If it is over a week or the traffic volume fall is drastic, there might be some other serious factors hurting the traffic volume to your website.
Here are the two elements that you might want to consider for drastic fall in traffic volume:
- Redirects
Placing the Redirects is one of the most significant steps for any website design redo projects. Any mistake or skipping here will certainly lead to a massive drop in traffic volume.
Redirects need to be put in place precisely; until and unless you have recreated each and every page of your website with precisely same URLs. These Redirect links keep search engine crawlers informed of the location of new pages; without this, the crawler will take those pages gone.
You can check the issue by visiting Google’s Search Console and see if you have missed a redirect link to any page. You will be able to find out pages without a Redirect link here.
Remember, you will have to create a 301 redirect link for each and every page of your website to fix this issue and get the traffic back to normal levels.
- Site structure
Just like the absence of a proper postal address will leave postal office baffled to deliver your letters, similarly, the absence of a proper and comprehensive site structure will leave the search engine crawler baffled to properly index website’s pages. Thereby, if you have completely overhauled the website design, you need to set up a fresh and comprehensive site structure to it as well.
Apart from the basic sitemap, you need to revisit the internal links to your site as well. The inter-page links on your website act as a deciding factor for a search engine to index the site.
Final Words:
To be brutally honest, you shouldn’t expect the traffic volumes to return back to threshold levels overnight, provided the drop is caused by one of the above-listed issues.
That being said, you need to hire a reputed website design firm at first place to keep these mistakes from happening. Secondly, your first priority should be to remove these issues rather attract traffic by any other means. Once you are able to remove these issues, you can expect to get higher traffic volumes gradually within few weeks.
Auckland web design via Starlinks offer comprehensive and reliable website design and redesign services to small and medium business in Auckland. You can too maximize your e-commerce business revenues by getting your websites done by our expert designers.