A Technical SEO Checklist For Ecommerce Website Revamp

Revamping an e-commerce site? Don't lose domain authority or organic search traffic and conversions. This checklist will help you avoid the most common SEO consequences during your reform.

Reshaping an e-commerce site is part of the natural brand progression.

Reforms keep your brand relevant and your message up-to-date can radically improve the user experience and may be necessary to keep up with changing web standards.

At the same time, restructures can result in dumping SEO authority and throwing away organic search traffic.

Collaboration between SEO professionals and web developers is extremely important.

SEO should be a concern throughout the redesign process from beginning to end.

The following technical SEO checklist will help you keep track of the changes made during the remake to prevent pitfalls from happening.

1. Crawling & auditing the existing site

Use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog to get an index of your web pages and various important bits of Metadata that you will want to refer back to throughout the development.

Make sure to save the original crawl report. You will need this information to ensure continuity between your existing e-commerce site and the upcoming version of it.

After you complete your crawl, categorize any of the following issues from within the original crawl report, creating separate tabs in a spreadsheet or separate spreadsheet for each:

• Duplicate page titles, image alt, H1 tags, or meta descriptions
• Missing page titles, image alt, H1 tags, and meta descriptions
• Page titles too short or too long
• Meta descriptions too short or too long
• Links to 404 pages
• Links to 301 pages
• Links to any other 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx status code URLs
• Any inconsistent use of HTTPS vs HTTP or www vs non-www

You have to also:

• Check for a mismatch in the number of URLs crawled by Screaming Frog and the number of URLs indexed by Google. You can find the same by doing a “site:my-site.com” search or through Google Search Console.
• Make sure you have a valid XML sitemap and make a copy of it.
• Ensure you have a valid robots.txt file and make a copy of it.

2. Setting up the test site

In setting up the test site, help the developers to keep the following in mind during their development if required:

• Preferably, the existing site’s crawl report (the original one) should act as a base for the upcoming site. Make a copy of the original crawl report and keep notes of any changes to be made on the redesigned site, especially any URLs that will be altered or removed, inside it.
• Address any issues you faced in auditing the existing site and map the changes to the redesigned site and keep notes in the original site crawl report.
• Make sure that the test site in a non-indexed state from within the robots.txt file. You do not want Google to start exposing your pages on WIP (work is in progress) mode in the search results.
• Make no changes to any of the URL folders and filenames unless absolutely necessary. They should be as close to identical as possible, with exceptions only to deal with discrepancies and web pages you do not want to carry over.
• Any URLs that are changed should have the links (links from within the same website or domain) to them changed. You should also set up .htaccess to redirect the old URLs to their equivalent new ones, but this mustn’t be an excuse to leave the internal links untouched. Links to 301 pages lose Page Authority and create unnecessary server load on top of wasting your crawl budget. Your original site crawl data will tell you about internal linking along with the anchor text. Make note of these modifications in your original crawl report.
• Eliminate any links to pages that you are removing and make note of the changes in the original crawl report.
• If you are combining any of your pages into a larger yet single central resource page, update the internal links on your pages so that they point right to the new resource page, rather than simply redirecting or removing the links. Make note of these changes in the copy of the original site crawl report.
• Do not create “soft 404s” by replacing missing pages with redirects to the homepage or any other irrelevant page. Google has been very clear about the logic for removed pages to display as 404.

3. Crawling & auditing the test version of the site

Do a complete crawl of your test site, again using a tool like Screaming Frog that you used on the existing site. Download and save this as your first test site crawl report.

Start by verifying that all of the issues discovered in crawling the live site are not present in the test site’s crawl data.

Now make a fresh copy of your original site crawl report, having all of the change notes, and do a find and replace operation inside it so that the URLs have the same structure as the test site. For example, replacing https://my-site.com/folder/page with https://test.my-site.com/folder/page. Save this as a testing crawl data file.

Now set the Screaming Frog tool’s crawler to “list mode” and crawl the test site using your testing crawl data file. This will check each URL individually to see if there is a matching page on the upcoming site (i.e., the test site) for every page on the existing site. Download and save this as the final test site crawl report.

To recap, at this point you should have:

• A crawl report of the existing site and a copy that you have made with notes to address any fixes.
• A crawl report of the test site and a copy of that you can edit.
• A testing crawl data file containing your existing site’s URL is edited to match the test site’s URL structure.
• A final test site crawls data file containing the results of checking each individual URL using your testing crawl data file.

You will use all these files to ensure there are no inconsistencies between the new site (i.e., the test site) and the old site (i.e., the existing site) in the following steps.

4. Matching up your content (existing site vs. up coming site)

You will need to take the following steps to ensure that the existing site and the test site line up in the approved manner:

• Address any 404 pages in your final test site crawl report first. If you noted that these pages were being removed entirely, no need to do anything. If you noted that these pages were being moved or merged, you will need to set up redirects in .htaccess. And add these 404 URLs to a spreadsheet of relocated pages; you need to make sure that all internal links to these pages will have to update at a later stage.
• If you encounter any 404 pages in your final test crawl report that are not noted as either removed or relocated, do a search for a matching title tag, meta description, or keywords on the first test site crawl report to see if there are any good matches. If not, verify that the old page is intended to be removed or if it should be present on the upcoming site but is missing accidentally and needs to be added.
• Like 404s, create a spreadsheet of any 301 pages in your final test site crawl report. While the redirects mean that the site should be operational, you will still need to ensure that internal links to these pages are updated at a later stage.
• Verify that there are no duplicate or missing title tags, Meta description tags, image alt, or H1 tags on any of the pages in your final test site crawl report.

5. Prepare redirects for all changed URLs

You will need to pinpoint any URLs that have been reformed that you haven’t yet set up a redirect for:

• Filter out the list of 404 pages from the final test site crawl report.
• Search for the Meta title of the first 404 pages on your original test site crawl. If there is a match, set up a redirect in .htaccess from the old URL to the corresponding new URL.
• Repeat this process for each 404 URL.

If you encounter a 404 on your final test site crawl that doesn’t have a matching Meta title tag, search for keywords or Meta descriptions or any unique identifier that matches.

If there are no matching pages on the upcoming site, note this in your spreadsheet and leave that 404s for the time being. In the next step, you will ensure that no internal links are pointing to these missing pages.

6. Audit internal links

Now it’s time to take care that all of the links on the upcoming site point to the appropriate page.

• You may find it now easier to run one more crawl of your test site after updating .htaccess in step 5 to ensure that all pages are either HTTP status 200 or 301.
• Do a bulk export of all of the links on the site from your crawler tool.
• If any 404 links remain, address them first. If .htaccess was applied correctly, all of the remaining links to 404 pages should be removed.
• You will need to update the links to your 301 pages so that they point to the appropriate page instead of the redirected URL.

7. Finalization & launch the revamped site

By now all crawling issues should be addressed and the upcoming site should be ready for launch, but you will want to run a final crawl before doing so.

There are a few things you will need to verify during the launch process:

• Remove noindex entirely from the test site’s robots.txt during the migration.
• Ensure that .htaccess is operating on the correct URL structure, not the dummy URL structure of the test site.
• Run a final crawl after the launch to ensure that there were no issues in migrating the test site to its live location.
• Re-upload the updated sitemap.xml file to your server.
• Re-upload the updated robots.txt file to your server.

Note: .htaccess is a fantastic way to manage all the redirects but remember that it’s essential to keep it organized, else, your site’s restructuring work will face some serious consequences. If required, consult with an SEO professional for hassle-free site migration.

Conclusion

As I said in the beginning, a collaboration between developers and SEO professionals is critical.

Make sure that you have correct crawl data on the original site as well as the test site throughout the development.

Be as clear as possible with all the stakeholders about what will create issues and what needs to be avoided throughout the reform.

Remember that this checklist is a guide. You will likely end up with a customized one base on your unique project requirement.

Keep a record of which issues have been addressed and which persist.

Nonetheless, this checklist will help you avoid some of the most common consequences brands face during site restructure.