Will a new site design affect rankings?

[anon123]

I've been working on re-designing my site for about 6 months now with a Content Management System.

My old site has (some pretty ugly) HTML pages I built from scratch.

This is going to be a huge transition, with changes to overall design, meta tags, etc.

I was just wondering: How do complete site overhauls effect your ranking in Google?

My site ranks pretty well now, but it's a chance I'm willing to take because the current design is so outdated.

I've put hundreds of hours into building the new site and am close to launching the new one.

What's going to happen? Anyone with similar cases that can say what happened to them?

(The CMS is Wordpress by the way, hope it's OK to say that, and if others have had success with a Wordpress site and Google rankings.)

[tedster]

If you change the actual urls, you will have a rough period. If you change textual content for the pages, you may also have a real mess.

My advise is to deploy your site in a test environment first - and then really test the bejabbers out of everything your can before you launch. There's a thread about just changing the urls in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. It may give you some food for thought.

Especially test your new website for any technical faults that allow the same content to be accessed by different urls: with and without "www", http vs. https, query strings, changed order of parameters, bad query strongs, mixed case issues, index.html vs directory root, double slashes vs single slashes, "404" error handling. Nail it all down BEFORE you go live.

[mayest]

I moved my site to a CMS about 7 months ago, and all of the URLs changed. I was careful to set up 301 redirects for each page. My toolbar page rank disappeared for about three or four months, but traffic only dropped very slightly (0% to 5%). I suspect that slight loss of traffic had more to do with seasonality and my visitor demographics than with the move. The pagerank eventually came back to where it had been previously.