A website redesign is an integral phase of every online business. If you have a website, you will definitely need to redesign it a few years down the line.
But the question is “when is the right time to redesign a website?”.
Well, below are some of the circumstances where you may need a website redesign:
- When your website’s design is outdated.
- When your website starts experiencing several functional issues.
- When you change your brand image.
- When you want to take your website to the next level.
- When your website’s theme causes your website to load slow or show errors.
Although redesigning a website could be exciting, it may bring several challenges to you or your website builder. And if those challenges are not addressed properly, they may affect the performance of your website or search engine rankings.
In this blog post, we have shared 8 things that your website developer must take care of while redesigning your WordPress website and making it live.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Content mirgration
Generally, there are two ways to redesign any WordPress website. Your WordPress developer can either build a new website and migrate the contents from the existing website or he can change the design or your existing website without creating a new setup.
If the former is the case, your developer needs to ensure that all the contents have been migrated properly and nothing is left behind.
Especially if your website is already ranking on search engines, you do need to ensure that migration is done properly otherwise, you may end up losing your search engine rankings.
#2 Website's URLs
Another important thing to ensure while redesigning a WordPress website is the consistency of URLs.
Your website builder must ensure that all the URLs of your existing website must be carried forward to the new version of your website unless there is any specific reason to change them.
Again, if your website is already getting a significant amount of traffic from search engines, changing its URLs drastically may affect your SEO score.
#3 Forms testing
Have you tested all the forms on your new WordPress website?
The existing forms on your WordPress website may stop working after redesigning. So, you must test and make sure that all the forms are working as expected.
Here are some of the things that you may want to check with your website forms:
- Form submissions are done correctly and saved at the website’s backend.
- Form fields validation is in place.
- All the forms are responsive (mobile-friendly).
#4 Loading speed
If you have added some additional features to your new WordPress website, you must also check the loading speed of your site. Some of the newly added plugins can cause your website to load slow.
Why website loading speed optimization is important?
- The loading speed of a website can affect the user experience.
- Slow-loading websites have a high bounce rate.
- Slow-loading websites are not liked by search engines.
How to check the loading speed of a website?
You could use any of the effective yet free tools like https://tools.pingdom.com to check your website’s loading speed.
Your web developer can fix the loading speed of your website by:
- Installing a plugin like “WP Total Cache”.
- Minifying CSS scripts & JS scripts.
- Fixing or replacing the faulty plugin, if it’s causing your website to load slower.
#5 Browser compatibility
Your new WordPress website may look good on your computer’s browser. But it may not look the same on other users’ computers.
What’s missing here?
Browser’s compatibility.
Your website visitors may be using different browsers than yours.
It is therefore important to check the browser compatibility after your developer has redesigned your website. There could be a chance that your new theme is not compatible with all the major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.
#6 On-page SEO port over
If your existing WordPress website has been optimized for search engines and is already ranking higher on search result pages, then it could be a bit trickier to redesign your website. Any small mistake can ruin the SEO credibility of your website.
Fortunately, there are some easier ways to port over the on-page SEO elements to your new website.
Below are some of the important things that your web developer can do while redesigning your website:
- Migrating all the meta tags like title tags, alt tags, canonical tags, anchor tags, and meta descriptions for each webpage.
- Ensuring that there are no broken links on the new website.
- Ensuring that the interlinking among all the web pages has been done correctly.
- Maintaining the URL consistency according to the old website.
- Port over of important files such as sitemap, robots.text
#7 Port over of trackers
This is yet another important check that you need to take care of while redesigning your website. You need to ensure that your website builders have migrated all the important tracking scripts properly so that you don’t miss out on any crucial insights.
Below are some of the tracking scripts that are used commonly on websites:
- Facebook Pixel
- Google Analytics
- Conversion script from Google
- Conversion script from Facebook
#8 Data migration
Needless to mention, before you make your redesigned website live, you must ensure that the whole data has been migrated to the new website.
Especially, if your existing WordPress website has a lot of form submissions data or customer details, they need to be migrated completely before you make your new website live.
Fortunately, in the case of WordPress websites, there are several plugins available that your developer can use to migrate all the data from your existing website to the new one.
