Website redesign and it's impact on ranking

[Justin45]

Hey Everyone,

I have had a website in place for over 7 years and I am now at the point where I need to implement a redesign in order to sell our product more effectively.

-URL's will stay the same
-Content will change but be very similar page-to-page
-Title & Meta tags will remain the same

I'm planning on taking the site from a non-backend site to a wordpress site so the navigation will change.

Does anyone foresee that this change will have any dramatic effect on site ranking?

Thank You!

[jws8118]

If you keep the same URL structure and properly SEO optimize the WP site then you shouldn't have any problems with rankings.  I recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress and making sure you correctly implement your robots.txt file to block any archives or duplicate content that might get created by Wordpress when you bring the content over.  Wordpress has author archives, date based archives, etc and you need to make sure you don't get any duplicate content indexed.  The Yoast SEO plugin has a great post here with all the details:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

[WilliamCarr]

Provided that you do everything James is suggesting, you shouldn't have an issue.

I've noticed small dips in rankings immediately after a redesign, only to regain their original positions within 2 weeks (or so).

[Justin45]

Thanks Guys!

[AKClinics]

Thanks James,

We just finalised to redesign our website and also are following the ways you suggest here. Hope we won't be having any problem at all.