Website updating - SEO impact

[CarolineH]

I am currently trying to pluck up courage to redesign my website - a daunting task for those long cold winter months.

I am quite happy with my rankings with Google, but am afraid that any tweaking that I do to my site will have a negative effect on this. I did not initially create my website - but have managed it for the last 6 years and all changes that I have made have been "adding" on to the existing structure. I wanted to go with a Wordpress feel site, which would be starting from scratch, but I am very nervous about doing this.

Any suggestions?

[Harborfields]

My impression is that changes to a website, redesigns and the like, are generally looked upon favorably by Google, so long as you remain consistent on message with rich content, etc... (paying attention to your SEO). In other words, Googe likes to see sites remaining fresh and being maintained. I think chances are that your ranking will improve, so I would say go for it.

(this is just my opinion, not based on any empirical evidence or other authoritative source...

[Margaret]

We redesigned our website completely a couple of years ago with no noticeable damage to SEO. We are about to do it again. I feel it needs revamping every 2-3 years - the design at least. The only changes I make to content are updating and that happens all the time.

[gam]

Going with Wordpress would be a good choice. It's easy to use, has a big choice of themes (design templates), is very SEO friendly "out of the box" and has thousands of plugins available for every conceivable additional functionality. If you want a test drive before committing, just sign up with wordpress.com for a free account and webspace and get experimenting. You could if you wanted point your domain to whatever you created in Wordpress.com but I'd advise just using it for practice and load Wordpress onto your own space. Less restrictive.

Yes, Google likes sites that change/update regularly and certainly won't punish you for that. It's not so happy about pages that disappear or change urls. That's easily solved by using 301 redirects which tells Google that a page once called x is now called y. Looking at your current site, with one exception, they're all html pages e.g. /pool.html. If you go with Wordpress, even if you still call your pool page pool, it won't be pool.html any more. When Google crawls your new site it will also look for the old pages it knows about, won't find them and will get a 404 error. In fact it will get a 404 for every old page and that certainly won't help your SEO one bit. 301 redirects will easily sort that out.

If the above panics you and you're thinking you don't know how to do that, don't worry. It's simple to do and I'm happy to help if you get stuck.

So, my advice would be to give Wordpress.com a go first and see how you get on - with no risk. If you like it then great, if not, you've lost nothing other than a bit of time.

[CarolineH]

Oh, thank you - that's given me a bit more confidence. Thank you, gam, I have created an account this afternoon and am having a play - seems very blog related, but I'm sure that I'll make sense of the pages section so that I can make it look more like a site. Very kind of you to offer help - it does panic me a bit, but I get like that with all jobs - if I get bogged down with a problem, I'll PM you if that's ok.

[gam]

Wordpress used to be very blog orientated and that legacy still lingers. However it is in use by over 20 million sites now including some very, very big names.

There are a number of LMH members who use Wordpress either directly or indirectly (promote my place is custom Wordpress).

A good example of a LMHers Wordpress site is Chalet la Foret

[NuBeginnings]

We use word press as one of our SEO tools but it takes a huge amount of work to stay on the first page.
A word of warning if you are using different media platforms to help bring you up the rankings make sure most of your content is original other wise you could find your self going down.