How to plan and manage a website relaunch | International SEO

Gianna Brachetti-Truskawa, International SEO Manager at Bold Ventures, discusses website relaunches and how to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible.

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(00:32) What are some of the reasons why you might want to relaunch a website?

Key takeaways:
- You might want to improve conversions.
- You might want to rebrand your website.
- Your URL structure might currently not be very good.
- You might want to migrate your website from HTTP to HTTPS to improve security.
- You might want to get rid of old content.

(03:43) What should you do at the start of the website relaunch process? The first step is obviously to identify what you want to achieve, but what other steps need to be done during the planning phase in order to minimise the risk of failure?

Key takeaways:
- Do not try to change everything at once, e.g. don’t change the URL structure and the aesthetic design at the same time, otherwise it will be impossible to work out what caused any subsequent changes.
- Test your website performance before relaunch, so that you can do a before and after comparison.
- Make sure that all relevant teams are involved in the relaunch process. Often, SEO teams are not included in the process, but they should be.
- Have a robust process in place, with checklists, so that you are following a structure and do not accidentally leave anything out.
- Have good monitoring processes in place. Make sure that your tracking and analytics systems are working properly.
- It is advisable to do a crawl on your website in the test environment prior to rollout, and a crawl after rollout, and compare the two.
- Make sure that you have the server logs for your website.

(09:52) When you are doing a relaunch for an international website with lots of different subdomains or folders in different languages, that adds extra challenges. Are there any things you particularly need to bear in mind when working on international websites?

Key takeaways:
- Be careful when changing domains between gTLDs and ccTLDs.
- Remember that you need to translate and localise your content.

(14:34) As you mentioned before, there are many things that can go wrong with website relaunches, so it is quite unusual that a website will relaunch with no problems whatsoever. How should you react if you notice negative changes to rankings, traffic or conversions following a website relaunch? How can you ensure that you do not see long-term, or even short-term, negative impacts on performance?

Key takeaways:
- Check if there has been a change in the robots.txt file, e.g. if you have accidentally disallowed all bots.
- Check if the tracking pixel has disappeared.
- Check if the test environment has been indexed.
- Define how bad the problem is and think about what you can do in the meantime.
- Consider using PPC to improve website traffic in the short-term, whilst you are fixing the website.
- Be aware that different types of relaunch have different typical problems. Consider creating a spreadsheet of these typical issues so that you can go through these lists and quickly identify problems to be fixed.