April 5 2022 | IT Solutions
How to Safely Upgrade Your Website
Website is the most important tool for any company to sell its products or services. It’s a platform where people can find information about your company, and your product or service. So, it is very important to upgrade your website with the latest content and make sure it’s user-friendly for customers. Redesigning your site is sometimes unavoidable. But, you can get the support from an IT solutions provider who can provide professional website maintenance services and continually keep your website in a healthy condition. They can ensure smooth and seamless site transfer or updating domain and reconfiguration.
Why Should You Upgrade Your Website for 2022?
A website redesign is a marketing investment that will boost your revenue by improving your rankings and traffic. It's very likely that you're redesigning your website to make it more appealing to your target audience. A more appealing website will create more income and increase return on your investment. Here are some reasons why you may need to upgrade your website:
User Experience (UX):
Your present website does not deliver the best user experience, either because it is too confusing or because it is too slow. Alternatively, you could have a poorly designed User Interface (UI).
Mobile optimization:
A subset of the above, mobile optimization is more crucial than ever in an eCommerce industry dominated by smartphones and tablets.
Changing CMS:
You may have recognized that your present CMS isn't cutting it any longer. It's time for a change for a variety of reasons, ranging from UX to SEO.
Rebranding:
If your brand persona is a little out of date, you may want to consider changing your brand assets, which includes your website.
There are a variety of other reasons why you would wish to revamp your site, including security and store upgrades.
Tips to Update Your Website
- Make a list of everything on your current website:
The first step in redesigning your website is to generate a list of everything on your current site so you can make sure nothing is missing from your new one. There are a few things to do, such as:
- Make a list of all of your website's pages: This is required to ensure that you do not overlook anything during the redesign process. This can be done using a crawler (such as Screaming Frog) to generate a spreadsheet, or by looking at your sitemap or Google Search Console.
- Examine all of your site's features: Examine your site's performance, sitemap, headers, metadata, canonical tags, and title length, among other things.
- Create a staging area:
- 301 Redirects should be set up:
- Audit your staging area:
Instead of making updates to your website, use a staging site to protect your rankings. You may also establish a staging site to "noindex," which allows you to build your site without worrying about it being recognized as "duplicate" to your live site. To avoid losing your SEO rating, it's critical to include as much of the original site's content and design as feasible while creating a test site.
Ensuring you have all of your redirects in place is an important part of switching sites, but you can save yourself by preserving as many of your URLs as possible. You may maintain the links from your old website by using 301 redirects (and not annoy your customers with broken links). If you use WordPress, 301 redirects are simple to set up using plugin or third-party integration like Redirection for WordPress. You may establish your redirects from the DNS level if you use CloudFlare as your DNS, which is a simple and seamless way to do it.
It's just as vital to audit the staging site as it is to audit the actual site. When auditing a staging site, there are a few things to look for:
- If you make too many design changes, Google will treat your site as a separate entity.
- If you've consolidated any pages, this will have an impact on your rankings and redirects.
- It's critical to ensure that all of the pages from your original website are retained.
- You should examine characteristics such as your site speed, sitemap, headers, canonical tags, title length, and so on, just like you did on your old site.
- Start using your new website:
Congratulations, your new site (and your old one) is now ready to go live!
However, the job isn't done yet: you still need to make sure Google can find your site.
- Re-index your site: To ensure that your site is indexable, set it to "index." This may appear to be a no-brainer, yet it is the most common error made when creating a new website.
- Make sure your robots.txt file is up to date: To make it easier for Google to index your site, provide a sitemap in your robots.txt file.
- Submit your site to Google Search Console: You must submit your sitemap to Google Search Console in order for your page to be ranked.
- Check the Robots.txt and Meta Robots files:
- Create a Google Search Console account:
- Keep an eye on the site's performance:
An explicit link to your updated website's sitemap might be included in your robots.txt file. You're making crawling and indexing as easy as possible for search engines by inserting your new sitemap in the robots.txt file. Make sure you're not mistakenly blocking key pages from being indexed. On the other hand, if there are any landing pages that you do not want to be indexed, double-check those items right now. If you have any canonical links set up on your site for pages that are quite similar, double-check that they are working properly.
If you're new to Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools), Google has a simple guide to get you started. Make sure you publish your sitemap URL to Search Console in addition to including a link to your sitemap in your robots.txt file. This makes it easier for Google to find and index all of the indexable pages on your new site.
After altering your site, you should expect minor ranking changes, but any substantial concerns should prompt a more thorough examination for any ranking elements that may have been lost.
If you’d like to discuss how to properly upgrade a website, make sure to approach an IT services company that provides website updating services.