A well-designed, user-friendly website is essential for all businesses, from the corporate giants to the local mom-and-pop shops. For many small, local businesses, budgets are tight. A common way they save money is by creating and managing their website using drag-and-drop website builders like Wix, Squarespace or Shopify.

These website platforms are popular due to their ease of use, which enables business owners to establish and maintain a digital presence without coding knowledge or support from a marketing agency or web design company. However, DIY website builders do have limitations. Local search engine optimization (SEO) expert Chaz Edward pointed this out in one of his case studies.

In the case study, Edward explained that his customer’s site struggled to rank partly because Wix’s platform has many SEO-related constraints. This example highlights the conundrum of simplicity versus effectiveness. While creating an attractive site in-house is convenient, it won’t benefit the business much if it doesn’t rank well on Google and your target audience can’t find it.

To grow, businesses must make SEO a priority. In this blog article, we’ll touch on the SEO limitations of drag-and-drop website builders, detail the benefits of an SEO-focused website redesign strategy and outline a typical redesign process.

The Problem with Website Builders Like Wix

Website builders like Wix feature user-friendly templates and functionality that make creating and editing pages easy. However, they have limitations in advanced SEO. These drawbacks include:

• Limited Customization for Technical SEO: Wix doesn’t allow much flexibility in customizing things like URL structures or implementing advanced schema markup, which are critical for enhancing a website’s visibility to search engines.
• Site Speed Challenges: Wix is notorious for slow load times due to bloated code from unused features, a factor that severely impacts SEO performance. Google has made it clear that page speed is a ranking factor, and slow websites get penalized.
• Mobile Optimization Issues: Although Wix offers mobile-friendly designs, the actual performance and customization options on mobile devices can be subpar, which hurts rankings under Google’s mobile-first indexing approach.

These issues can put a ceiling on how well your site can perform in organic search, which is where a website redesign comes into play.

Why Redesigning Your Existing Website Improves SEO

Why does a redesigned website improve SEO? Moving to a platform that allows greater flexibility offers benefits that include:

• Better Content Management System (CMS) for SEO: An alternate platform can enable full control over technical SEO elements. You can customize meta tags, integrate plugins for advanced SEO functions and ensure optimal URL structure.
• Optimized Site Architecture: A redesign lets you rethink your entire site structure, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages. This can improve visibility in search results.
• Faster Load Times: With more control over hosting and design choices, you can significantly improve page speed. Redesigning on a more flexible platform can eliminate the issue of unnecessary code bloat.
• Enhanced Mobile Performance: A redesigned site ensures that you’re optimizing for mobile in a more tailored, high-performing way. This focus on mobile-first indexing will ensure the new site is more competitive on the search engine result page (SERP).
• Advanced Structured Data and Schema Markup: Adding rich snippets and structured data improves your visibility in search results. Platforms like WordPress allow for deeper customization that Wix can’t match.
• Improved User Experience (UX): A better UX leads to lower bounce rates and longer dwell times. These behavioral signals are important for SEO, as Google tracks how users engage with your site.

The Website Redesign Process

Redesigning your current website for SEO is more than just switching platforms. It requires a carefully thought-out process. A successful website redesign strategy commonly includes the following steps:

1. SEO Audit: A comprehensive SEO audit identifies current gaps and opportunities. Insights from Google Analytics or whatever SEO data source that is available will help guide the redesign process.
2. Platform Selection: Full SEO control is important, so choosing a CMS that provides it is essential. WordPress, for example, offers plugins like Yoast SEO for easy optimization.
3. Content Audit & Creation: A website revamp is a great time to perform a content audit. Identifying existing content needing updates or opportunities to create new content to fill topic gaps contributes to a better website. Providing website content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EEAT) is a major Google ranking factor.
4. Design & Development: Once the sitemap and content are finalized, design and development can begin.
5. Final Testing: After the new site is built, final testing is done to ensure there are no issues. This includes checks to confirm everything displays correctly on all devices, there are no broken links, form submission alerts are working properly, etc.
6. Website Redirect: A proper 301 redirect plan should be in place to retain link equity from your previous site. Failing to set up redirects could lead to traffic loss on your new website.

Ready to Begin a Proper Website Redesign Project?

Wix and similar alternatives might be a great starting point for businesses with limited technical skills, but its shortcomings in SEO can stunt your growth as you scale. A well-planned website redesign offers the chance to get past those limitations, providing a solid foundation for long-term SEO success. So, if you’re serious about organic search performance, investing in a redesign could be the smartest move for your business.

Ready to begin a successful website redesign project? Digital marketing, including new and redesigned websites, is one of our specialties. When you partner with a marketing agency, website redesign is handled by experts who can deliver the right combination of look, UX, content and search engine optimization. Your site will climb the rankings, see an increase in website visitors and generate business like you haven’t experienced before!

Have questions about web design and SEO or want to learn even more? Call us at 815.431.1000 or submit this form to contact us. You can also visit the Web Design & Development and SEO & SEM sections of our blog.