How to avoid a website redesign horror story (CHECKLIST)
Tips to ensure a digital makeover doesn't crater organic lead flow
DEAR STAGE 2: This is my first time leading a website redesign project. I work for a startup and we have strong inbound lead flow that the sales team depends on for hitting their demo and closed revenue targets. I’ve heard horror stories of organic traffic falling off a cliff post-launch. How can I make this a seamless transition? ~Website Woes
DEAR WEBSITE WOES: We’ve all heard of these horror stories! I’ve personally been through a number of website redesign projects and participated in many more with portfolio companies. Consistently, the branding, the look and feel, and the messaging are top of mind (as they should be!), but who is responsible for SEO during the planning process and technical development? And this is what your question comes down to — if SEO is not top of mind as you plan for, migrate and launch a new website, organic lead flow can suffer.
I called on Alex Boyd, the founder of RevenueZen, a top-rated agency specializing in SEO to help us think through how we can best avoid these “horror stories” — and horror stories they are. Do the math on what a 50-75% drop in inbound lead flow equates to for sales productivity. If that doesn’t scare you into taking website migrations seriously and slowly, nothing will 😅.
Alex pointed out that while an agency is often brought in to lead the website project, it’s your responsibility, as the internal project lead, to ask the technical questions:
Is the site backed up?
Who will do a pre-launch crawl and backup on Screaming Frog?
Is the site structure changing? If so, why?
Is any content being removed?
Who will be carrying over our site tags, structure, meta, H1s, etc?
Are the new Solutions pages going to remain optimized for Search?
How will the new site perform in Core Web Vitals?
Whose job will it be to remove no-index tags from pages newly-published from staging?
Who will resubmit the new sitemap to Google Search Console?
Who will QA our GTM tags to make sure conversions continue firing properly? What about forms?
Leveraging his own experience and expertise, Alex assembled a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to cover the technical side of a website migration. We’ve turned this into a checklist that you can duplicate (File > Make a Copy) and make your own.
As Alex put it, the goal of this checklist is to ensure you're dotting all T's and crossing all I's before and just after migrating a website to a new design and/or CMS.
Alex also shared some incredible advice for a founder or marketing leader embarking on a website project. Read on…
If your website isn't bringing you any leads and you don't have any SEO to speak of, some of these steps aren't as important. First and foremost, be mindful of broken areas on your site - 404s and broken links, especially on areas of the site where buyers are finding you, contacting you, and booking time with your team.
If your website is bringing you traffic and/or lead flow, do not underestimate the potential negative impact of not following this. Alex has personally seen multiple teams go from 10-15 leads per day, to 2-3 per day. And the longer your newly-migrated site goes without fixing issues that come up, the less you will be able to recover, because Google will start to bump down your rankings the more that visitors stop being able to find and interact with your site in the way they used to.
The most important things to watch to avoid losing SEO juice during any website change are:
URL structure (avoid changing URLs names, but if you do, use 301 redirects to communicate what the new URL is for that content - you can do this in any major CMS)
Site meta tags - Title, H1, Meta Description, and URL slug should either stay the same, or be even better-optimized in the process
Broken pages and UX - Thoroughly test the paths website visitors take to interact with your site and do business with you. Look for anything broken or off. Your storefront should have clean glass panes, not plastic bags over some windows.
We hope you can learn from our mistakes and use this checklist to make sure that no harm is done, that everything has been set up correctly, and that the site performs better than before. Go grab that checklist and make sure you are prepared to launch the new site!
Until next week!