Redesigning a website can either bring joy or sadness to a site owner. Why joy? This is because with a proper site redesign, it can bring a lot of new visitors to the website. It can also bring sadness if the redesign messes up with the search engine optimization that has already been made to the website.
An important factor to consider while redesigning a website is to get ready with all the 301 redirects. This must be done to all URLs that need to be changed while redesigning the website. Not only will this help with SEO but it also reduces the chance of a visitor stumbling to a 404 page.
Next is to install all analytics code inside the website. May it be Google Analytics or any other type of analytics that the user has in mind, install it as soon as possible so that it can track what is going on outside of the website. Users can see any faults that they may have had during the redesign with the help of analytics as well.
A website with a high-traffic or has a lot of visitors coming in should make sure that most of the highly used features are still accessible by the visitors.
Canonicalize the website by redirecting the traffic from the non-www to the www version of the website or vice versa. Search engines such as Google tend to think of the two versions as a separate entity and unless the site owner wants to get penalized for duplicate contents and such, it may be best to do the redirect.
Remember to stick to the 5 seconds rule. Make sure that the main information is accessible within 5 seconds and if it takes longer than that, site owners may find themselves having a high bounce rate.