According to an article in Forbes, businesses rebuild their websites every 2 years, 7 months. That means if you're reading this article, there's a good chance that you are only a few months away from starting a new website project for your company.

Before you start on your next website rebuild project, read on for some ideas to avoid website rebuild problems.

Benchmark Your Current Website

It's impossible to know if your new site is an improvement over your old website if you haven't benchmarked your old website's performance. By benchmarking your existing website, you will have an exact measurement from which to improve.

Benchmarking is essential, but you're probably asking yourself: "what should I benchmark?" The answer to this question depends on the goals that you have  for your website.

Do you have an e-commerce site and want to increase sales? Do you have a B2B website, and you're looking for more leads? Or, is your organization a non-profit, and you want your website to help you with donations?

Outside of the nuances that each of these different types of objectives will bring, some of the metrics that will be consistent across most websites will be:

Engagement: What pages on your site are getting the most engagement, and what is that engagement level? Don't mistake traffic for engagement; they are entirely different. Traffic is going to be a result of your marketing efforts for acquisition. Engagement is a metric focused on the visitors' interest in your company, products, or services.

Databox surveyed marketers and asked them; What percentage of the metrics you track regularly are focused on measuring engagement?" Their top answers on which metrics they measure were:

Organic Traffic: This is a measurement of visitors to a website that came to the site through the unpaid listings from a search engine results page.

Number of Sessions: In Google Analytics, a session is the period of time that a visitor is on your site.

Pages Per Session: This is the average number of pages viewed during one session. This metric is calculated by dividing the number of page views by the total number of sessions.

Average Session Duration: A session duration lasts until the visitor leaves the website or until there are 30 minutes of inactivity.

Average Time On Page: This metric shows the average amount of time that a visitor spends on a page of your website during one session.

Bounce Rate: A "bounce" is a single-page session. A bounce rate is the number of single-page sessions divided by all sessions.

Returning Visitors: These are visitors to a website that have visited the site in the past and have returned. To be recognized as a returning visitor, they must return to the website from the same device within 2 years.

Goal completions: Goals within Google Analytics measure a completed task that a business has identified as a goal.

By benchmarking your current website among the metrics above, you'll have an excellent baseline to use when you begin measuring the performance of your new website.

Lost SEO Rankings

Yes, it can and does happen. Companies will have a new website built and lose all or at least most of their pages that have been ranked in the search engines. This phenomenon is seldom thought about until after the loss has occurred.

To understand how this can happen, we have to have a basic understanding of SEO and how pages get ranked. There are hundreds of "ranking signals" that Google uses to determine where to rank a website page and for what keywords. Many of these ranking signals are on-page elements.

In the case of a rebuilt website, that means the elements of the old pages were a component of the page's ranking position on the search engine results page. Because all of the old pages are now gone, and the content from those pages is either "pasted" into the new pages, or the content has been completely rewritten, much of that SEO value could have been lost.

Some of the more common areas of loss for search engine ranking with a new website are:

Redirects: A redirect is when you tell the search engines that a page on your old site is either moved or is now located at a new URL. When you're having your website rebuilt, this is one of the most common errors that we see. Too often, the redirects are either misconfigured, or they're entirely missing.

This creates two problems. First, when Google's bot tries to crawl your indexed page, it won't be able to find it. Second, when a visitor tries to visit your page from a search engine result, they won't be able to find it.

Either of these issues will have a catastrophic effect on your website traffic.

Missing Pages: This is another issue that seems to happen with new website projects regularly. Because of changes in the new website, often it will be decided to eliminate some pages. Because most people won't benchmark their old sites, these old pages often had been ranking at some level now by just removing them, that ranking is lost.

Content Changes: The content on your website's pages is a significant factor in the search engine ranking for that page. Any rewrite of a webpage content should be carefully evaluated and if it is determined that a rewrite is required, be sure to write the new content with SEO best practices in mind.

Protocol and Domain: If your site is still on an HTTP protocol, then take this opportunity to switch it over to a secure HTTPS protocol. If you want to change your domain from www.mysite.com to simply mystic.com, again, this is a perfect time to do this.

However, if you are going to make either of these changes, be sure to establish your redirects properly so that both your visitors and the search engine bots will be able to find your new website.

Broken Links

If you've been using an internal linking strategy properly, you have hundreds or even thousands of links on your website pages pointing to other pages on your website.

It should be obvious why broken links are a problem; both search engines and visitors will become annoyed by not finding the information that they went looking for.

There are several tools to help you find broken links, but we most often use Screaming Frog and Google Search Console.

Once you've identified all broken links in your new website, it's a simple matter of going through and fixing the broken links.

Conclusion

If you are planning on rebuilding your website in the future, I hope you will find this information helpful. Just like any business activity, a well-thought-out strategy will save many problems that can happen and help you avoid a lot of wasted time and money.

If you have questions about an upcoming website redesign project, you can contact us here.