Ready to Launch Your Redesigned Website? Do this First!

Ready to Launch Your Redesigned Website? Do this First!

A redesign can devastate traffic if you don’t relaunch carefully.

Inevitably, styles change and your website starts to look outdated. While a reassuring feature for longtime visitors, new traffic tends to see an outdated web design as an indication of a poor quality website. In the early days of the web, style was less important than functionality. Today, various tools make functionality run smoothly, but without a good design, you’re losing traffic. But redesigns should never be approached lightly. They can undo all your hard traffic-building work if not done right. When you’re site has an updated fresh look, don’t even think about launching it until you’ve taken these steps.

Design and Usability

The tools that attract users to your site need to work well with the new design. Few things irritate users more than when an update removes functionality instead of adding it. Be careful that your applications can still prove the same outcomes your users have come to know them for. Market test changes before they go live.

Design and SEO

So many aspects of your website affect SEO that it can be hard to keep track of how they all interact with other parts of running a website. Have an SEO checklist of all the technical parts of your site that affect rank. Crawl your website to be certain every single page is included in the checklist. Pages with high inbound link profiles should be given special attention. Address each of the following SEO aspects on each page:

• Load Times - The page needs to load quickly, so be careful to avoid adding redesign features that are bandwidth heavy. Avoid flash and other unnecessarily script-heavy content like plugins or new usability features.
• Redirects - If part of your SEO strategy involves changing URLs to be more search friendly, redirects must work. Internal links must point to any newly assigned URLs.
• Indexing - The robots.txt file must be correct. Certain new pages must be excluded from indexing while other new ones must be included.
• Analytics – Be sure you have a benchmark to start from before the redesign and don’t forget to be certain analytics is in place before relaunch.
• On-page SEO Elements – All the elements that make your current pages successful must transition to the new site’s pages.

Each of these details is very important. Assign a team member to pick through each piece of SEO one page at a time, ensuring each works as intended.

Redesign and Familiarity

Redesigns should look fresh and new, but they need to be familiar enough that old users will feel they are still at the same website. Check that the elements users identify with most are still on the site, whether in the form of colors, logo, text or functions.

Let efelle creative help your redesign launch successfully.

Our design experts understand how important it is to keep the hard-earned traffic your website has when redesigning it to attract new users. Call us at 206.384.4909 or use our online contact form to discuss your website redesign.