You’ve finshed the redesign of your website, now what?
The process is done, you followed our steps to make sure your site is up to today’s standards and the site has launched. There are a couple items that need to be checked to make sure your newly designed site can be found and tracked.
Unblock search engines from crawling your site
When launching your website after a redesign, it’s important to double check that the search engines know where to find you. A common mistake people do is block search engines from their website during the redesign phase and forget to unblock them when the site is complete.
This issue can cause problems when sometimes developers forget to unblock robots from crawling and indexing the website after the website goes live. Search engine optimization is one of the main resources people use to research and purchase a product.
“SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising have a 1.7% close rate. (Search Engine Journal.)”
One reason this happens is because the site is in a dev environment and has robots.txt set to block all search robots. A robot.txt file is a simple text file placed on your web server which informs webcrawlers like Googlebot if they should access a file or not.
The site is then taken live with all-exclusive robots.txt file still in place and the site’s search traffic reduces.
Search engine optimization allows people to be able to find your website. You can double check with Google Webmaster tools to ensure your site is being indexed.
Add analytics tracking to your site
Your website redesign needs to be compared to your old website with analytics software. Once your new website is released, you should be collecting data on its performance.
A couple of questions to ask yourself after you apply tracking software are:
- • Did your content audit and keyword research pay off?
- • Is that new URL structure making it easier for visitors to navigate through your pages?
The goal being you want your new website to have a higher conversion rate than your old site. It is impossible to measure without any conversion code or analytics tracking it. That is why it is important to paste the proper Google analytics code on the new website.
Another reason it is important to track your data is to drive continual improvement of the online experience to your customers and prospects.
If your website redesign is not easier for customers and potential clients to use then your new website is not serving its purpose.
Ultimately, your website redesign should add value to your viewers. Analytics will help you make improvements to your website and your sites visitation will increase.