Redesigning your website can be a truly exciting time for everyone involved. You get to give your site a new look, a new content and (hopefully) generate new traffic in the process. When doing a redesign, however, there are a number of different things that you’ll need to consider. There are a few common mistakes in website redesign that you should go out of your way to avoid at all costs.

1. Failing to Think About SEO From the Beginning

If you aren’t thinking about SEO when designing your site, you have little chance of making a strong impact afterwards. You may also inadvertently break rules that you were unaware of and get penalized before you have a chance to start.

2. Not Auditing Your Existing Site

What are the ways that your existing site can run faster? Smoother? Offer a better user experience? What should I be keeping? These are always questions that you should be asking yourself during a redesign.

3. Failing to Use Commonly Searched Keywords

If you fail to use commonly searched keywords for your business, you’re making a small mistake that could be leaving a lot of revenue on the table for no good reason.

4. Not Setting Up 301 Redirects

Doing so will allow you to automatically redirect people who are trying to access your site via an old URL that you aren’t using anymore.

5. Not Considering URL Structure

URL structure is one of the many small but necessary steps that you can take to help make sure that your site is loading as fast as it possibly can.

6. Shady Backlinks

Back linking is a great SEO strategy – if you go about things in the right way. Shady backlinks, on the other hand, are one of the easiest ways to get your site instantly penalized by search engine giants like Google. Getting penalized results in a site that is essentially impossible to find, which will stop your traffic dead in its tracks.

7. Not Implementing Responsive Design

Responsive design makes sure that your site looks as good as possible across all platforms – from desktop computers to the smallest mobile device and everything in between. A huge segment of the population will view your site on a mobile device. Failing to implement responsive design tactics risks losing all of these people.

8. Forgetting to Unblock Search Engines

Unblocking search engines allows them to find your site and index it in their results. If you don’t unblock search engines, nobody has a chance of finding your site on things like Google.

9. Not Using Analytics

Analytics are incredibly useful for finding out actionable information about the way your visitors are interacting with your site. It tells you the pages they’re spending the most time on, the pages they can’t leave fast enough and more.

10. Failing to Think Like a Human

You should always trust your instincts during a redesign. If some element of your site doesn’t feel right, or if it’s something that you wouldn’t like as a visitor, don’t implement it.

Regardless of the size of your business, if you operate in and around the Pensacola, Florida area, HIP is the go-to agency for all of your marketing strategy and website design needs.