There are a million checklists online to help web developers with site redesign, highlighting all the things they shouldn’t forget to do, or check, from a design and development perspective.
However, your web designer/developer isn’t necessarily going to remind you to put your remarketing tag on your new site, or update your destination URLs in your email marketing campaigns. Sometimes you only find out about these things weeks later, when you stumble across something broken, or when one of your customers alerts you to a problem.
We’ve worked with many clients going through redesigns and have made this checklist as a resource to help you make sure your online marketing survives your site redesign.
Many of the below tips are only necessary if your URLs change, whether because you are moving to a new domain or because the structure of your site changes.
SEO
SEO for a site redesign would be an entirely separate article. A redesign isn’t just about ensuring your content matches your targeted keywords, it’s also about making sure your internal links still work, your canonicals are in place if needed, your robots.txt doesn’t block your site, your sitemap.xml has been updated and many other things.
During a site redesign, you should consult with an SEO specialist to ensure your site will retain it’s search engine value. After your redesign you should also review the site (here’s one checklist we prepared earlier) to confirm that you’re still ticking all the boxes
One of the most important SEO things to do is to ensure that your old pages 301 redirect to the most relevant new page. This will mean that the history that the old pages have will get passed onto the new pages.
Google Tag Manager – Update!
If you are doing a whole site redesign, consider updating all your online marketing tags (eg Facebook tracking & Google Analytics conversion tracking) to use the Google Tag Manager. This will make it easier going forward for you to manage your tags, and you won’t need a developers help every time you want to implement a new one.
Google Analytics
If you are implementing Google Tag Manager, great! Get into it, and put your Analytics tag in. If not, don’t forget to put your analytics tag sitewide on your new site.
You should also:
- Update all your goal URLs
- Put Event tracking links onto your relevant buttons/downloads/links
- Setup Ecommerce Tracking
WebMasterTools
Verify your site in Webmaster tools. If you are moving the site to a new domain let Google know here when you do it. You can also see a list of links to your site – if the target pages don’t exist any more, make sure redirects are in place or contact the site owner and ask them to update the links.
You can also use Webmaster tool to test any rich snippets you may have setup (a redesign is an ideal time to add them – see www.schema.org for more information). You can use Google’s rich snippet test to see if the developer has implemented the code correctly.
Adwords
While link redirects should be sufficient to ensure your ads are going to the right pages, ideally you would eventually change the destination URLs in your Adwords interface. Don’t forget to change links in these locations:
- Ad destination URLs
- Keywords destination URLs
- Site extensions
Don’t forget to place your remarketing tags on your new site (either directly or in your Google Tag Manager). If you are segmenting traffic by page, don’t forget to update the URLs in your ‘audiences’ as well.
You will probably have to update the Conversion Tracking on appropriate pages
Other Paid Ads
Update destination URLs in all your other paid ads. Don’t forget:
Update Product Feeds
If you are an online retailer you might have product feeds going to multiple sites, like comparison shopping sites. Don’t forget to update these.
If you are using Google Product Listing Ads you will need to update your feed in Google Merchant Center.
Social Profiles
If you are linking to any pages with a changed destination URL, update them in your profiles
- Twitter Bio
- YouTube Channel
- YouTube in-video
- Facebook About page
- Facebook tabs
- GooglePlus About page
- GooglePlus – linked authored articles
Of course, this is an incomplete list….
Email Marketing
Update your email marketing templates
Update the footers in all your emails.
Heat Map / Click Tracking
It’s a great idea to put a mouse tracker on your site after (and even before) a redesign, to see if people are using your pages the way you thought they would. You can get a free 30 day trial for this.
And That’s It!
As you can see, a site redesign isn’t complete when all your onsite bugs are fixed, you still need to update all the places you promote your site.
Let me know in the comments below if I have left anything out!
