Site redesign. Possible SEO problems?

[skalfa]

Hi!

Our website has enjoyed good rankings for lots of our keywords for the past 9years.

Over the years the site became heavy, so we want to change the design radically. Content, filenames, titles, urls etc. will all remain identical just the change of a template. The new one is minimalistic and responsive design. We are worrying this may drop our domain or page authority and kill all our past SEO efforts.

**How to do this with the least harm to our rankings?  Anything we need to avoid?**Articles/advice/suggestions comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help!

Alina

[pompero99]

Hello Alina, recently i changed design of my website (the same you want to do) but i did not change the url's and titles because if i have made that i have lost rankings.

My advice for you is that you change your design but try not take the url's and titles, at least url's. Finally, if you do that, please, 301 re-direction, but you'll lose rankings, sure.

Regards

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Alina,

Changing your site is always a daunting task, but as long as it is for the better, there is no reason why you should lose out.

I have done this a few times now and each time I have been improving the site and then seen a positive jump in traffic and conversions.

All you are doing is changing the template, but when completed, do check the site over with Screaming Frog Spider just to make sure the new template hasn't created any obscure pages or issues that you can't see.

-Andy

[danwebman]

301 Re-directs all the way ensuring that all of your old URLs resolve to relevant content. One thing I would advise against is a splash screen and making sure that all of your content is available within 3-4 clicks.

Good Luck

[ThompsonPaul]

She clearly states "Content, filenames, titles, urls etc. will all remain identical just the change of a template." so redirects don't enter into the equation here.

[ThompsonPaul]

Fully agree with Andy. The trick with these kinds of design updates is to have a clear testing plan to make certain that, even though you don't think URLs, content, titles etc are being changed, they actually haven't changed. There can be many edge cases where, even though the template change should interact the same way with all content, titles, URL rewrites etc, it just might not. You want to confirm any such cases have been found and fixed before going live with the new design.

Paul

[TheeDigital]

Screaming Frog's a great one, a few Google Chrome plug-ins I would use are:
ReDirect Path -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll
Check My Links -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

If you use these in combination you will hopefully be able to find any errors in your new design.

[skalfa]

Now the other question: how much can we change the content not to lose the ranking? Does the change of titles and the content structure influence? What if I leave the keywords but change the content structure?

[skalfa]

Thank you for a reply, Andy!

Now the other question: how much can we change the content not to lose the ranking? Does the change of titles and the content structure influence? What if I leave the keywords but change the content structure?