Google’s John Mueller answered a question about the SEO effects of making user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) changes to a website, advising that it’s best to plan ahead because it takes longer to fix problems if changes break SEO.
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)
User interface and UX are primary elements of a website that affect how easily site visitors get to what they have, and ultimately affect user satisfaction.
User interface elements affect how site visitors interact with a website, such as navigation, input forms, and informational icons.
User experience elements are a broader range of considerations related to accessibility, design consistency, mobile responsiveness, readability, site speed, usability, and many other elements than a well-considered design has a positive impact on user satisfaction.
This can affect SEO ranking from technical issues related to how Google crawls the page to on-page ranking considerations such as how content is displayed and therefore understood on a web page.
Making site-wide changes to UI and UX changes, as well as adding new web pages, is a major task and should not be taken lightly.
Google Office Hours Site Changes
John Mueller of Google read the submitted question:
Anjaney asks: We are getting ready to launch a new website design for my company, including UI/UX improvements and new pages.
Is it better to change the page layout one at a time?”
Mueller responded:
“One complexity is that a relaunch can mean many different things, from just switching a website to a new server and leaving everything else the same, to changing domain names and all the content too.
First, you need to be absolutely clear about what is changing on the website.
Ideally, track all changes in a document and note which may have SEO implications.
If you’re changing URLs, we have a great guide manage site migrations in our documentation.
If you are changing the content or user interface, this will also affect SEO.
If you’re not sure about the effects, I strongly recommend getting help from someone more experienced – it’s easy to screw up a larger renovation or migration in terms of SEO, if done without proper preparation.
Even with everything done correctly, I get nervous when I see them being done.
Fixing a broken migration will take much more time and effort than preparing well. In any case, good luck!”
Plan before making changes
As Mueller recommends, it’s wise to create a plan for how the changes will be rolled out. It is of particular importance to document the state of the website before making any changes, create a backup and use a test environment.
1 – Track the website
An important thing to do before making major changes to a website is to crawl it with an app like Screaming Frog. Browse the website in its original form, then track the updated version (preferably before publication).
Trace data can be used to identify a number of potential issues that can be fixed before the site goes live.
Things to check:
Detect missing pages Catch misconfigured links Missing meta and title elements Check for changes in link patterns Detect 404 errors Check that 301 redirects are in place and pages are working properly
2 – Create a backup copy of the website
Always have multiple backup copies of a website. There are so many things that can go wrong with a website backup. I learned the hard way about having multiple redundant backups.
For example, a consultant working on my server downloaded images using the wrong transfer type, corrupting hundreds of thousands of images. Fortunately, I had backups on my desktop and duplicate backups on the server itself, so the images were recoverable.
I have over 20 years of experience managing my own websites and dealing with client websites. The value of making multiple backups, including backups of backups stored on separate media, cannot be overstated.
3 – Stage the website
It’s good practice to stage the new website so that changes can be reviewed before they hit the live server.
The live version of a site is called the production environment, and the non-live mirrored version is called the test environment.
Website staging refers to the best practice of creating a duplicate version of a website (also known as a “staging environment”).
Ideally, the staging environment should be on a separate server, or at least in a separate location from the server, so that there is no chance of changes to the staging environment accidentally reaching the live (staging environment production).
The staging environment is used for development testing and quality assurance before changes are implemented on the live website. The main purpose of staging a website is to identify and fix issues, technical errors or bugs before they are moved to the live version of the website (the production environment).
More resources for website migration
Management of successful SEO migrations
Enterprise level site migrations
Essential steps for a seamless website migration
Mistakes to avoid with site migrations
Featured image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi
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