Excited to revamp your web design layout and turn into a modest web page?
But are you sure about this decision?
Are you ready for search engine ranking changes?
I understand, site owners change their web layout for several motives. Such as website appearance is not appropriate on tablets or smartphones. Another reason can be swapping Content Management Systems and so on.
How does this alteration affect Google’s search ranking?
In the latest incident of Google’s Official hangout hour, a publisher questioned if modifying a web design layout can shake ranking.
This was his question –
“I recently changed the layout look and feel of my blog and moved away from WordPress. And now using Hugo static site generator for publishing my posts. Does the change in layout impact my ranking and search results?”
The site owner emphasized that the website’s URL and content continue to be the same.
Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller responded yes. Altering the web design can certainly move your web page rank on Google.
Let’s understand
How Altering Web Design can Affect your Search Rankings?
Every template you build or purchase needs size and color optimization for icon and navigational images.
Typically, site owners want to make their web templates innovative. For instance, sometimes web templates have heading elements for styling the sidebar navigation. Publishers include slight twists for compatibility. This ranges from CSS update styles and using several HTML elements on the page.
Consequently, though the website’s structure and content continue to be the same, the search engine can note these minor variations. Site framework alterations can misplace your links.
Many site owners while redesigning their websites mess up the website framework. They don’t understand that they are building a load of SEO issues.
For example:-
- Page-level variations generate broken internal links all over the website. Further, it may lead you to tons of 404 errors.
- Similarly, any changes in the URL structure can create more than hundreds of broken links.
- Multiple 301 redirects can lower the page speed and performance.
John Mueller described:-
“So just because the… kind of the primary content like the blog posts that you have and the URLs themselves don’t change doesn’t mean that there’s nothing else around all of that, that search engines won’t be able to pick up on. It can definitely affect SEO.
So, it’s not that you need to avoid making these changes but rather when you make these changes make sure to double-check that you’re kind of doing everything really well”
Nevertheless, John Mueller stressed that the result isn’t always undesirable. Occasionally, varying your web design can positively impact your web page’s search ranking.
Piece of advice – Changing a web layout is more like starting from scratch. It is beneficial to be familiar with the style sheet & the underlying code, thus you can plan the changes in detail.
You Should Make Web Design Layout Changes Or Not?
As long as some of your web pages are ranking good, evaluate those pages meticulously and find out the design that is feasible for you. You can reprise that design for the other pages that are not ranking well. Though, you have to be watchful.
If you cannot comprehend the coding and stylesheets reach out to a professional. A website auditor and marketing expert can inspect your website design layout and identify the faults that can obstruct your website SEO.
Tail End
The specific characteristic of web design is that it is more than just enticing humane visitors. Likewise, a web design must allure search engines as well. Modifying the web page is not wrong, yet ensure that changes will not hurt your search ranking.
