Will a redesigning a blog hurt it's SEO?

[Storm]

I have been thinking about redesigning one of my blogs and was wondering if I do some drastic changes will it affect it's SEO and rankings.

Has anyone done this and seen any changes in their rankings either good or bad?

 

[david smith]

Redesigning is done for making the website better with its functionality. If webmaster finds a negative change in their traffic after the passage of initial test day, then there may be something wrong with the design which is not gone well with the users. The previous design was good, but the webmaster wants more traffic and ultimately redesigned a website that did not need redesigning.

 

[ulterios]

It shouldn't have much affect on the SEO of your site but it can either harm or help depending on how your site is/was before the redesign.

If you have a poor designed site that is hard to navigate and the new design is easier to navigate then that can help people stay on your site longer which is a plus as well.

If your current design is harder for the search engines to crawl regularly and find new content then that could be hurting the SEO of the site and a better design could help that.

There are a lot of variables besides the actual look of your site that can play a role of the design of a site and it's role in SEO.

 

[Traveler]

If you make improvements then it might actually help the seo if your site is poorly designed and coded right now. Sometimes just doing a little design change can make your site more user and search engine friendly and help it's seo.

 

[officeshub]

Redesigning of the website can give negative or positive impact it cannot be predicted.

 

[Storm]

Redesigning is done for making the website better with its functionality. If webmaster finds a negative change in their traffic after the passage of initial test day, then there may be something wrong with the design which is not gone well with the users. The previous design was good, but the webmaster wants more traffic and ultimately redesigned a website that did not need redesigning.

I was mostly meaning redesigning it by changing a theme and making it look nicer with some layout changes also.

Do you think that changing a wordpress theme can have an affect or do you think that doesn't matter?

If you make improvements then it might actually help the seo if your site is poorly designed and coded right now. Sometimes just doing a little design change can make your site more user and search engine friendly and help it's seo.

The thing is that I don't really know if it's designed well or not. It's a wordpress site and I was thinking about changing the theme and doing some layout changes.

Redesigning of the website can give negative or positive impact it cannot be predicted.

Would it be better to just leave it alone and not take a chance on messing things up?

 

[Traveler]

The thing is that I don't really know if it's designed well or not. It's a wordpress site and I was thinking about changing the theme and doing some layout changes.

I really would not have an idea on how to tell if something is well designed for seo. I usually judge a site by how easy it is for me to get around.

I know you can check the speed of your site so maybe that can be some kind of judge as to how well a theme is but that only tells the speed.

 

[Storm]

I really would not have an idea on how to tell if something is well designed for seo. I usually judge a site by how easy it is for me to get around.

I know you can check the speed of your site so maybe that can be some kind of judge as to how well a theme is but that only tells the speed.

Well I was planning on checking the load speed on pingdom before and after any major change. I know speed has some impact on SEO but it's supposed to be a small one.

 

[matteomatt]

Part of it depends on how you do it. If you have high ranking pages and you delete them and replace it with new ones it might hurt rankings, but you could redirect it.

If you are just adding content and changing the layout it shouldnt hurt, google does like to see updated content especially if you make it longer. Part of it depends on how much changes from google's bot and algorithmic point of view

 

[vishwa]

If you only change the design of your site like color, fonts, etc than it won't have any impact on your site SEO. However make sure that you haven't changed your url structures. If you do so than you might face a problem.

 

[Storm]

Part of it depends on how you do it. If you have high ranking pages and you delete them and replace it with new ones it might hurt rankings, but you could redirect it.

If you are just adding content and changing the layout it shouldnt hurt, google does like to see updated content especially if you make it longer. Part of it depends on how much changes from google's bot and algorithmic point of view

I was just going to do some changing of the colors and layout an probably a new theme. I heard that changing themes can sometime hurt the SEO so I am a little worried about that.

 

[Storm]

If you only change the design of your site like color, fonts, etc than it won't have any impact on your site SEO. However make sure that you haven't changed your url structures. If you do so than you might face a problem.

It's just design stuff and nothing with the url structures or anything like that will be changed. Just visual stuff for the most part of it.

 

[ulterios]

Well I was planning on checking the load speed on pingdom before and after any major change. I know speed has some impact on SEO but it's supposed to be a small one.

Yes speed is only a very small factor and you'll only really see it have an impact if your site goes from one extreme to another, really fast to really slow or really slow to really fast.

 

[Storm]

I think main point is urls and website structure.

I would not be changing any of those. I was just going to maybe change the theme and some design things. I don't want to mess with my URLs, that scares me.

 

[Smith-K]

There are chances your rankings might get hampered for a short period but apart from that I do not see any major issues as long as you are sticking to the rules. It is always a good thing to enrich UI ecperience of the website.

 

[Storm]

There are chances your rankings might get hampered for a short period but apart from that I do not see any major issues as long as you are sticking to the rules. It is always a good thing to enrich UI ecperience of the website.

The main thing I was trying to do was to make it look more modern and make things easier for my visitors to find things they are looking for. Right now it kind of looks like a website that was made 10 years ago.

 

[Dean]

I have redesigned some of my blogs over the years and have never had any kind of negative affects at all.

As long as you are talking about visually redesigning your blog and you are not changing the URL structure or something else that plays a role in SEO then you should be fine with redesigning your blog.

 

[Storm]

I have redesigned some of my blogs over the years and have never had any kind of negative affects at all.

As long as you are talking about visually redesigning your blog and you are not changing the URL structure or something else that plays a role in SEO then you should be fine with redesigning your blog.

Yes it would mostly be the visual things. The color, the theme and maybe some of the way things are laid out on the page. I am not touching anything that is important at least that could have a big impact on it's important things like the URL's.

 

[JennyJ]

I was wondering about this same thing since I have been thinking about doing some redesigning on mine. I was going to change the theme and some of the colors.

If I notice any changes I will share them here.