Website redesign and SERPs performance

[tranquilito]

Hi,

I'm planning a small redesign of my web site and I would like to ask if, from your experience, it will affect ranking performance.

I will modify HTML and CSS code ( plus php mysql optimization ), mainly moving a table structure which I have today to CSS design. As an example, the source code will be reduced from approximately 1800 to 900 lines on root page and from 1600 to 800 lines of code on internal pages.

Tags, structure, description, content, internal linking, etc will remain the same.
The web site is 13 months old.

[gn_wendy]

in my experience redesign will affect the rankings.

if you are making improvements to your code - then you will see benefits in the longterm, but be advised that any major changes will spur movement in the rankings (both up and down) for a couple of weeks.

[seoN00B]

yes it will affect everything.

[LostOne]

I'm facing the same situation, but hardly any changes in navigation. No php just plain html. I would not think any changes would happen. html code will be reduced (redundant tables removed) by 80% but the same great content remains. I'm hip on caffeine!

[Robert Charlton]

Tags, structure, description, content, internal linking, etc will remain the same.

If there are no changes in page titles, content, or navigation, my experience is that there hasn't been any ranking change at all. I'm referring here only to changes on already well ranking sites... semantically well-structured... mainly to clean up code.

Site redesign which includes content, nav, or url changes is another matter entirely.

Source ordering code when changing to CSS (ie, using CSS to position important elements near the top of the page), is another discussion. Because of the sequence of events in real world changes I've been involved with, the effects of source ordering have often been hard to pin down. It's an approach that I recommend, but I haven't observed that by itself it makes an overwhelming difference.

For more on the effects of source ordering code, see this discussion, which is several years old now...

H1 H2 or H3 - plus semantic mark-up and source-ordered content
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3551397.htm
[webmasterworld.com...]

[freejung]

I just did a major redesign that actually included changes in nav structure as well as major changes in the code. So far it has barely affected my rankings at all, which seems odd because I was expecting changes due to the new architecture.

So my thought is, if you're not changing the content or the architecture, just the code, you probabaly won't notice much difference.