Is your website to small for all the features you want? Is the website outdated in design, or hard to navigate around? Regardless of your reasoning, sometimes it is worth slashing and burning an old website in order to replace it with a newer, more streamlined model. The trouble is, that people become familiar with a website, and are actually less likely to visit a website if the website changes. What this means is a potential loss of sales and views. With an average loss of between 10% to 15%, lets take a look at a few of the ways you can handle the inevitable loss that comes with redesigning your website.
Optimize Error
With a redesigned website comes a new internal structure and addresses. People who are used to the old website may click on a link or type something in, only to see an error message that the page is no longer available. Leave things like this and you are looking at a loss of traffic in the 30% to 40% range. Take the time to carefully map every earlier address to either the newer version of the page, or at least the front page of your new site.
Monitor After Launch
Once your new website is unveiled, closely monitor it for a few hours. Keep an eye on unusual traffic drops, sudden spikes in error messages, a loss in keyword ranking, and Google indexing. All of these will tell you if something is wrong with your website, and you will be able to change it before to long.
Make The Most of It
Where as there can be many reasons why you may want to redesign your website, there are even more opportunities that you can gain by doing it right. Take some time to carefully plan what you are going to do prior to beginning work on the new website. Lay out every feature you want, and may want in a few years, and make sure they are all possible with your current design.
New opportunities that may present themselves include being able to update your current URL structure, and possible new keywords you can implement.
Though redesigning your website may mean a loss of visitors initially, it does not mean that this will become a permanent trend. Instead, by taking the time to carefully set up your website, you can set the groundwork for years of future growth, limiting the next time you have to do something just like this again.
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