Rankings “may go nuts” with a site redesign

We get enquiries from businesses all of the time where the migration to a new website has not gone well and they’ve lost rankings, traffic and enquiries. It’s unfortunately all too common. Search engine rankings are delicate things and when migrating to a new website, it’s all too common for the SEO aspect of the website to not be taken into account. Sometimes important redirects are missed when URLs are changed, sometimes the structure of the menu is changed and other times, the entire content is changed.

All of these changes can be disasterous for rankings if not executed well. We’ve seen it all too often. However, even if URLs stay the same, the content stays the same and the crawl paths through the website (how search engines navigate from one page to another) also stay the same, just changing the design of the website, and the associated HTML code, rankings can be impacted.

Google engineer, Gary Illyes posted on LinkedIn yesterday saying “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts”. The HTML markup is what search engines use to make sense of the pages, such as the order of the content, the headings, etc. If you change this, it will impact how search engines see the page and it can affect the rankings.

Migrations need to be handled with care, even small changes can have major consequences. Proceed with care!

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