I have a website that I made very quickly a while ago, using a WordPress theme. I completely forgot about it for a few months and checked the traffic for the first time today, and surprisingly it has been getting a lot of visitors and generated some income.
Currently the design is pretty horrible and I am 100% positive that if I re-design the website myself, I can get so many more visitors and conversions.
So I’m thinking about getting rid of WordPress and publish a new website using Bootstrap, and keep the same content and URL that I had.
But I’m scared that that would mess up my SEO and lose my organic rankings. I am on the first page of my main keyword and I would hate to lose this spot.
When a site goes through a design reconstruction, are there any specific steps that I should take? Should I just keep the WordPress site to be safe? Or am I worrying about something that won’t even happen? I would love to hear any tips or feedback about this.
I have had recent experience of just this problem.
The URLs from the wordpress site are a commodity which is invested in search engine servers. Your ranking (which has taken time to accumulate) is in part dependant on preserving the URLs of the pages of your site.
You will ideally need to place a redirect (.htaccess file if using apache) from the old URL’s to the new ones.
Rushing into commissioning a new site without reseaching this will cause you huge SEO loss that takes six months or more to recover from.
See this for more information.
Please take your time on this. I have too many companies call me on this when they screw it up.
Build out the new site on a test site that is not indexed, make sure it works, make sure the URL’s are the same, test it.
Make sure you have a perfect htaccess file and I mean 100% perfect. Flip the new site on with the new and updated .hatccess file and the make sure your sitemap and robots.txt file are steller. Submit all of it to Google Webmaster and to Bing Webmaster Tools. If you change your URL’s you are going back to the stone age. If you keep the URL’s the same you will not see an issue.
-Matt