Changing your website design definitely impacts your SEO. It depends on whether you’re doing a website refresh or redesign. A refresh is generally less risky. A redesign can help you get a bigger boost to your visibility, but it requires more caution. Plan carefully, audit your existing SEO, and make changes thoughtfully to keep or improve your rankings.
Redesign vs. Refresh: What’s the Difference?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of SEO, it’s important to understand the difference between a website redesign and a website refresh. Although they might sound similar, they’re actually quite different—and each has its own effect on your SEO.
A website refresh is like editing and a redesign is almost like starting from scratch.
Website Refresh
A refresh is more like giving your website a makeover. It’s about changing the surface-level elements—like updating images, tweaking colors, or changing the font. The content and structure usually stay the same, so it’s mostly visual.
A refresh is ideal if your site is already performing well but could use a more polished or modern look.
Website Redesign
A redesign is a much bigger project. It often involves changing the entire structure of the site, updating navigation, altering content, or even moving to a different platform.
A redesign can have huge benefits and completely change the user experience. It makes sense if your site feels outdated, doesn’t function well, or isn’t delivering the results you need.
How a Refresh Affects SEO
Let’s start with a refresh. Generally, a website refresh is pretty safe from an SEO perspective and can even make your SEO better.
- Better visuals: Updating images with optimized alt text can improve your SEO.
- More engagement: A better-looking website and better content encourages visitors to stay longer, reducing bounce rates.
Since you’re not altering much beyond visuals, the core elements that affect SEO (like your page URLs, headings, and content) remain mostly untouched.
However, there are still a few things to keep in mind:
- Loading speed: If you add heavy images or animations, they can slow down your page loading speed—and search engines don’t like slow websites. Always optimize images to keep your load times fast.
- On-page SEO: If your updates affect page titles, meta descriptions, or headings, it could reduce your site’s visibility in search results.
How a Redesign Affects SEO
A redesign has the potential to improve your rankings—or hurt them if handled poorly.
Here are the good ways a redesign can impact your SEO:
- Improved user experience (UX): A cleaner structure and faster navigation make your site more user-friendly, which lowers bounce rates
- Mobile responsiveness: A redesign often involves optimizing it for mobile, which is important as Google uses mobile-first indexing.
- Faster load times: Usually one of the key goals of a redesign is to make your website load faster, which is also a direct ranking factor.
In fact, quite often, a redesign is done to improve all these above factors, and thus your SEO.
However, it’s also easy to get it wrong, which not only doesn’t have the benefit of NOT improving your organic visibility, it can mess up your current rankings as well.
Here are the core aspects you need to watch out for:
- URL changes: If you change the structure of your URLs, you risk breaking the links that people (and search engines) are using to find your content.
- Content changes: When you update or remove content, you could lose keywords that are currently helping your site rank.
- Technical issues: A redesign often involves back-end changes, which could accidentally introduce technical SEO issues, like missing meta tags or broken internal links.
How to protect your SEO when you change your website design
Here’s how to make sure your updates—whether a redesign or refresh—enhance your SEO instead of hurting it:
1. Be choosy about the changes
Before making changes, analyze what’s working for your current website. Identify your top-ranking pages, high-performing keywords, and valuable backlinks. This will help you prioritize what to keep intact.
Here are some tools that can help you do it well:
- Google Search Console: Download a list of all the keywords each page is ranking for
- Semrush: Download all the keywords
2. Maintain URL structure
Avoid changing URLs whenever possible. But if you want to create a new structure with new keywords and topical clusters, it is unavoidable.
In that case, set up 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones so you don’t lose the traffic and SEO value built up over time. This also ensures that users and search engines are directed to the correct pages.
If you use a tool like Rank Math in WordPress, you can set up Redirections here as well.
3. Back everything up
Before making changes, back up your existing website. This way, you can always restore it if something goes wrong.
If you are using well-known hosts like Siteground or Hostinger, then they create regular daily backups as well. You can also use a tool like UpdraftPlus to make your own backups.
4. Test before you update
Whether you’re redesigning or refreshing, always test your changes in a staging environment before going live.
This helps you catch any technical issues that could hurt your SEO.
Again, hosts like Siteground, Hostinger, Bluehost, etc. offer staging environments.
