Updating a website is a lengthy and stressful process and one that can also be somewhat risky if you rely on your website for your business. While updating from time to time is absolutely necessary in order to keep your site looking modern and relevant, it also means straying from a tried and tested formula which could alienate your visitors. Furthermore, it also means deleting or just reworking a large number of files, and there’s a big risk that this could lead to some content getting lost or your marketing being affected. Here we will look at how to handle the transition smoothly, and avoid anything going (too badly) wrong…

Backup!

This is the first and single most important piece of advice: before you begin to update your site, make sure you have backed up all your files and that you have a copy of your site on your computer. This way in the worst case scenario you can at least just revert back to the site as it was.

SEO

If you have spent years working on your SEO to get to the top of the SERPs then you need to be careful when you update so that you don’t change the URLs of all your pages. Once Google has indexed your site you need to keep those pages in the same place or risk starting again – and if you start again with the same content then you’ll fighting an uphill battle because you’ll get the duplicate content penalty.

In other words then, update your pages – replace all the HTML and script on them if necessary – but keep them in the same place and give them the same filenames. If you’re upgrading to a PHP based site though, then there are ways you can get your servers to treat HTML pages as PHP ones or you can alternatively just use a re-direct.

Style

When changing the look and feel of your site your main aim should be to give it a new lick of paint and to make it more competitive by looking at what your rivals are doing. What you don’t want to do though is to veer completely from your original design and lose everything that once made your site unique. Too much of a change will lose you your loyal visitors, so make the changes small and iterative and listen to what your regular readers want.

Opportunity

Revamping a site is a great opportunity to make some other changes that will help you in future. For instance, by using better organization and comments in your coding you can make your site easier to update and redesign in future. Likewise by organizing the files better you can avoid errors or complications.

This is also a good time to revamp any of your content, which might mean looking for typos or just generally updating it and giving it a more modern spin – Google likes to see old pages updated. Finally, take this opportunity to remove any dead links or to replace any images that don’t look up-to-scratch.