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Concerned with losing rankings with website dev changes
Posted by on May 31, 2020 at 3:31 pmHey guys,
I’m going to post this in more relevant subreddits, but this is still an SEO question so I figured I’d post it here too.
Whatever this Google update was, did extreme wonders for me. My impressions, clicks and CTR have all gone up since the update dramatically, and it’s improved a lot of the positions for my blog posts which are now starting to show up on page one, and I expect some quality traffic to come through.
Currently, however, I’m not happy with the look of my website. I’m a web development novice, and I was concerned about the possibility of losing current rankings I have if I was to make any drastic changes.
I’ve built my website with WordPress, using a basic theme, and then using Elementor Pro to build the specific pages themselves.
I plan on staying with WordPress, but shifting across to another theme and not using Elementor whatsoever.I previously had to change the URL slugs for my blog posts, and as such I had to include a 301 redirect for all of them to ensure I didn’t lose any rankings. This time, it feels like it’s going to be an even bigger task to ensure I don’t break anything in terms of content, and making sure users could still view it after clicking from a Google search result.
Does anyone have any advice for me on how to proceed without the need for many headaches?
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1 Reply
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Some advice for you.
Go to google analytics, find which page is your number one traffic landing page. It’ll probably account for like 50% of your traffic.
Use this page as your test subject to get the clearest idea of impact. If you’re using elementor I’d recommend copying the current content and recreating it in default WordPress as best you can on a new page that you don’t publish. Then make a duplicate of the elementor page for backup and set that to private so google doesn’t crawl it.
Copy the default WordPress recreation into the current page keeping the same url etc. Once happy publish it. Delete caches. Look at analytics for the next week. If it performs fine then replace all elementor content with default WordPress editor version across the site. However if it drastically impacts that page then you’ll need to consult a professional. Once you’ve got your site done then try a new theme or you can try a new theme before. But themes generally in my experience affect UI menus etc that really should remain as identical as possible.
Page builders tend to really bloat up pages and load times. So getting rid of elementor as an installed plugin might actually speed up your site and caching of pages and reduce number of requests. I suspect you’ll get little change from any alterations as long as the wording and heading are the same. H1, H2 body copy images and alt descriptions, tags, seo etc. Good luck
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