SEO website redesign: the 30 key points to follow

Have you been toying with the idea of starting a redesign for a few months now? A new design, adding features, switching CMS, a technical upgrade, or improving the user journey are all reasons that might push you to opt for a redesign. Making your site evolve is a great idea, but be careful not to charge in headfirst! Before taking the plunge, there are certain precautions to take if you don’t want to see your site vanish off the radar… How should you prepare your redesign, and what are the points to watch to preserve the quality of your SEO ? In this article, we’ll discover the fundamental points to consider before, during, and after your redesign, as well as the techniques to test and QA your new site before going live!

Before starting a website redesign: how to prepare

Check the consistency of the site architecture before the SEO migration

A redesign means a new design, and therefore a new site structure! In other words, your redesign is the perfect time to think about the quality and consistency of your current site structure. And you’d be wrong to pass it up! Your new site structure should be organized to offer a better user experience and to improve your bounce rate. The clearer your site structure, the more easily crawlers can browse your site and index your new content.

The best way to visualize your future site structure is to draw it. This exercise will help you check that all pages are present and identify the logical links between each of them, and perhaps create new categories. The structure of your URLs can also be defined while building the site structure.

Carry out a semantic audit

During your redesign, it’s essential to include a semantic audit in your overall SEO audit. This step is the opportunity to take stock of your keyword strategy and to answer several questions:

• Which keywords do you currently rank for?
• Which strategic keywords do you want to rank for?
• What is the search volume for these various keywords?
• What is your competitors’ strategy?

This analysis forms the foundation of your content strategy. If you need to take stock of your site’s content and get recommendations to capture new traffic opportunities, Semji can help you with its Custom offer. Request a demo of the Semji solution now to learn all about its features.

Internal linking and managing the depth of strategic pages

Once the site structure and the semantic analysis are done, it’s time to look at the internal linking of your future site. Once again, audit what already exists and take a step back. Precisely list the different areas for improvement you could work on. The idea is to focus on the strategic pages to prioritize for ranking and to create internal links between the richest pages. Never lose sight of the fact that internal linking should make it easier for Googlebots to read your site.

Anticipate site loading performance and a Mobile Friendly version

Your redesign is an excellent opportunity to make technical improvements to your site. Your site’s loading time is something to consider carefully, because it has a significant impact on your SEO. A customer who waits is a customer lost! Google therefore tends to favor sites with a short loading time by ranking them higher on the SERP. If your new site is likely to be heavier than the previous one, get in touch with your host, who will offer a solution suited to your new needs.

The same goes for your site’s accessibility and its ease of use regardless of the device used: if you don’t have a responsive version, plan to include it in your redesign specifications.

Factor in the notion of crawl budget

When your site goes live, it will be visited and analyzed by Googlebots: this action is called crawling. To crawl a site, Google allocates a certain resource that is determined by several criteria: the size of the site, the crawl speed, the update frequency, the quality of the content, and the number of clicks…

If your new site has few pages, there’s a strong chance the Googlebot will crawl them all and index them as it goes. But if your site has several thousand pages, then only a few will be crawled depending on the available crawl budget. During a redesign, the challenge is to tell the bots which pages to visit and index as a priority, namely your most strategic pages in terms of SEO.

Redesigning a WordPress site VS a from-scratch site

The scope of the work to be done is generally not the same whether you’re on a WordPress site or a from-scratch one. With a few coding basics, you’ll be able to manage a good part of the WordPress site redesign yourself. For the rest, you’ll need to call on the skills of a technical team. In both cases, the points to watch during an SEO redesign are the same.

After launching your new site: which SEO optimizations?

Your new site has just been delivered and you’re thrilled with the result. But before celebrating, a number of On-site and Off-site elements need to be checked to design a rock-solid SEO strategy as part of your redesign. Here’s an overview of the fundamental points to consider for a hitch-free go-live!

Checklist to optimize On-site SEO during a redesign

The basic technical optimizations

First thing to consider: have all the basic SEO optimizations been carried out correctly? Is your site set up so that your site can be indexed correctly? To find out, you need to consider:

• the TITLE tag: on every page of your new site, is the TITLE tag filled in correctly? Is it representative of your business?
• the META description tag: if it isn’t written, Google generates it automatically, so its content isn’t optimized.
• the robots.txt file: when working on the pre-production version of the site, always remember to insert the “ noindex “ tag in your HTML code to block indexing of your pages. Once the site is in production, you’ll then need to make sure the site is crawlable, and therefore indexable.

Image optimization

Photos, graphics, drawings, diagrams… Whatever their form, your site almost certainly contains images. So that these image files can be ranked, make sure the ALT tags are filled in correctly. It’s thanks to this tag that the bots can understand the content of your images and index them.

Always remember to rename your files before putting them online on your site. If you didn’t do it on your old site, now’s the time to start!

Hn tagging across the different page types

Thanks to Hn tagging, Google will understand the structure of your pages and their hierarchy. Based on your semantic analysis, try to place the main keywords in the most important headings, but be careful about over-optimization…

On your new site, you almost certainly have different page types (product page, article page, brand page…), so you’ll need to define a suitable Hn tagging format for each of them.

Canonical tags to set up

Duplicate content is a practice to avoid in SEO. But depending on your business, your new site may have several pages with very close or similar content. If that’s the case, it’s essential to set up canonical tags. They serve to tell the Googlebots which page to index, but also that your site intentionally has duplicate content.

Faceted navigation to configure

If your new site offers a large number of products, faceted navigation is a good option for improving the user journey, and your SEO too! But this opportunity isn’t without risk. Poorly managed faceted navigation can very seriously hinder the good ranking of your new site

Check the URL structure

Without intervention, your pages’ URLs are generated automatically from the content of the H1 tag, or randomly. During your redesign, always remember to check that they really contain the keywords that define your page, and keep a certain consistency across the whole site. Google doesn’t like untimely URL changes, so build them correctly the first time!

Presence of a breadcrumb trail

Essential to navigation, the breadcrumb trail lets visitors know at a glance where they are on the site and lets them retrace their browsing path. But it also matters in terms of SEO. By using the Schema.org format, you can build a breadcrumb trail that will be displayed on the SERP thanks to microdata. On your new site, ensure consistency between the breadcrumb trail and the site architecture.

Managing pagination

If your site has a significant number of pages, whether in terms of articles, posts, or products, pagination will be very useful for your visitors to navigate your site without getting lost. But not only that. Pagination is also an important element for saving your crawl budget and avoiding duplicate content. If pagination wasn’t, or was barely, taken into account on your first site, now’s the time to think about it!

Configuring the sitemap.xml file

This file must be designed strategically because it will serve as a basis for the Google bots to identify and crawl the various pages to index. Think of this file as an invitation to crawl, an action that becomes all the more important, especially for large sites or those with an unusual site structure.

Optimizing the homepage

The homepage is one of the most important pages on your site, both for your users and for search engines. It’s where the majority of users land, but it’s also the page that generally benefits from the largest number of backlinks. The homepage must therefore be clearly structured and SEO-optimized in terms of both images and text. Also give great importance to the quality of internal linking, to make the most of the homepage’s link juice.

Configuring microdata

Microdata provides valuable information to search engines and enriches search results. It allows you, for example, to display the breadcrumb trail or the ratings given to a product directly on the SERP.

Check the quality of the responsive design

If your responsive version wasn’t top-notch on your V1, there’s no more excuse for it not to be on the new version of your site! This criterion is now of great importance, especially with the Mobile First Index. Google favors displaying sites that have a responsive version in search results, and even tends to penalize those that don’t. Loss of rankings, drop in traffic, plummeting revenue: don’t skip responsive!

Comparing site performance between the old version and the target site

The goal of a redesign is to have a better-performing site than the previous one, right? To make sure your new site delivers better performance than the old one, the best thing is to run an audit that will tell you whether your images are compressed, whether the site handles resources correctly…

If this wasn’t already the case on your old site, switching to the HTTP/2 protocol will let you drastically reduce your site’s loading time, with the benefits of an improved user experience and a good SEO signal sent to Google!

Auditing the new internal linking

Thanks to an audit, you can assess the quality of your new site’s internal linking. If your site structure is carefully thought out, you’ll have no trouble building quality internal linking. Diverse anchors and links between strategic pages are the keys to enriching your internal linking!

Auditing content depth

In the case of a migration, you need to make sure your site architecture is consistent with the depth level of your strategic pages and your SEO strategy. The most important pages must therefore be easily accessible and placed within a logical site structure, for both users and bots.

Correct implementation of the HTTPS protocol

Given the redesign, switching to HTTPS is no longer a negotiable option! Increased trust from users, extra security for the site owner, and better ranking on the SERP

: these are the advantages of HTTPS. Even though this certificate has a cost and setting it up requires a minimum of technical knowledge, the redesign is an excellent opportunity to take the plunge.

For an international site, 2 additional points to watch to build quality SEO on your new site.

Check the Hreflang configuration

In the case of an international presence and/or a multilingual site, clever management of the different sites is called for to handle site duplicates and thus protect yourself from penalties related to duplicate content. By using the hreflang-markup tag wisely, Google will know which version of your site is the most relevant to present to the user based on their geographic location. If your

In addition, you can also use the ‘’ x-default ‘’ link attribute to tell Google which page to send by default to the user in case no specific page is defined for their geographic location. In countries where several languages are spoken, this configuration makes a lot of sense!

How to optimize Off-site SEO during a redesign?

Once the entire On-site part is sorted out, it’s time to look at the whole Off-site side. In this section, we’ll cover, among other things, the issues related to competitor rankings, the quality of backlinks, and the use of Search Console.

Overall assessment of the site’s SEO statistics

The first step in the Off-site upgrade is to carry out an assessment of the site’s overall SEO statistics. The most powerful and comprehensive tool for this type of analysis remains SEMrush.

Study the site’s rankings on strategic keywords

The purpose of this analysis is to compare your site’s results with those of your competitors on strategic keywords in your industry. This way, you can set ranking goals and also get new ideas for high-potential keywords and queries.

The redesign is a good opportunity to review your editorial strategy and therefore to ask yourself about new traffic opportunities.

Compare your site’s external links with those of your competitors

By studying the backlinks your competitors have, you can more easily identify new high-popularity sites for posting your sponsored articles. To do this, focus on the top 10 competitors with the most links and list the most quality sites they rank on. Before sending backlinks to external sites, look into the statistics of the site in question, because a poor-quality backlink could have the opposite effect to the one you’re after! To stack all the odds in your favor of overtaking your competitors, the best approach is still to venture into previously unexplored territory.

Compare the target site’s traffic with that of competitors

Beyond a refined understanding of the keyword strategy and the backlinks obtained by your competitors, the organic traffic data generated by competitors is also interesting to use for comparison.

Google Search Console: your SEO’s best ally

The data collected by your Google Search Console

is an unrivaled help in analyzing your SEO performance. It is undoubtedly the go-to tool for anyone who wants to work on their organic search. If you hadn’t linked this tool on your old site, you unfortunately can’t have the data concerning it. By installing it on your new site, you can get some valuable information, including:

• the crawl errors listed by the bots, which you’ll need to fix as quickly as possible to guarantee quality indexing.
• the 404 errors listed in detail, which correspond to crawl errors, most often due to the migration.
• the list of SEO penalties, called ‘’ manual actions ‘’ by Google, incurred by the site and which can lead to a downgrade.

SEO best practices during a site redesign: testing, the QA phase, and going live

Preparation phase, On-site optimization, Off-site optimization: your checklist is nearly complete. The last step is to carry out the final tests and QA to make sure that going live runs smoothly… and that your site can start ranking as soon as it’s online!

Make sure the 301 redirects are correctly done and functional

The 301 redirect, also called a permanent redirect (not to be confused with the 302 redirect, which is temporary), automatically redirects a reader or a bot from the old page to the new one. Their purpose is above all to avoid 404 errors, which are fatal for your ranking. On the bot side, this redirect signals a URL change so that it can also de-index the old URL in favor of the new one. Essential for preserving your SEO score and your link juice, your 301 redirects must be listed precisely in the .htaccess file, which tells the server which actions to perform.

If one or more of your old pages don’t have a match on your new site, you can redirect them to the homepage or to a page with similar content.

Had you deployed a netlinking strategy on your old site? Same technique: you need to use 301 redirects cleverly to preserve your backlinks!

As you’ll have understood: during a redesign, managing 301 redirects is an essential step! It would be a shame to destroy all your efforts so close to the finish line, wouldn’t it?

Link Google Analytics to the new site and configure the tool

Before you can collect and use the valuable data from Google Analytics, you need to link your site to the tool.

When properly configured, Google Analytics can prove to be remarkably effective for monitoring your site’s audience and managing your SEO accordingly.

Start by creating a custom dashboard to get a 360° view of your SEO performance and how it evolves. Then, set up your goals to monitor the volume of inbound leads generated by organic traffic, direct and indirect conversions… Always keep an eye on the pages and queries that generate the most visits, and use these results to implement new traffic acquisition strategies.

Thanks to Analytics, you’ll also be able to measure the effectiveness of your redesign after a few months.

For greater effectiveness, also remember to connect your Analytics to the Search Console.

Declare the new site in the Search Console and submit the sitemap.xml file

The Search Console gives you an overview of your site’s health by showing you: crawl errors, loading speed, search traffic, external backlinks, any penalties, etc.

As part of a redesign, one of the most important data points to check is the number of indexed pages compared to the number of pages submitted in the sitemap.xml. And also the number of 404 errors.

Through the Google Search Console, you can also submit your new, updated sitemap.xml file to make it easier to index your new pages and present your site structure to the bots, or even submit each page individually and manually thanks to the ‘’ Fetch as Google ‘’ feature. If you have a multilingual site, remember to create a sitemap file for each language, or for each country.

The impact of a redesign on a website’s SEO

Preserving your SEO during a website redesign: is it possible or not? This article proves it: the points to watch during a redesign are numerous, and a simple oversight can have serious consequences for your new site’s performance and its ranking. By following the methodology of our Semji experts step by step, you minimize the risk of mistakes and stack all the odds in your favor to keep your rankings and gain new ones by designing a site built for SEO.

An experience lived by our client Qilibri (formerly Mon panier minceur). Faced with players already well established in its market, the young diet-balancing startup had the challenge of successfully redesigning its site and accelerating on the content lever to capture new SEO market share. Supported by the Semji platform and its experts, it first successfully carried out the migration of its site and, in just 10 months, produced nearly 800 pieces of content with +3400% SEO traffic on the site. To learn more about this collaboration, discover Quentin Leandri’s testimonial now, Marketing Associate at Qilibri.