Replacing old site, which way to go

[nahun]

Hi,

I have an 8 years old domain <example.com> with an html based site. My rankings were very good for the important keywords in the past years but my rankings degraded significantly and I only have some keywords with good ranking left.

I decided to make a new wordpress based website but I do not now wheter to upload it to my existing domain, risking my good ranking keywords or to register a new domain and start over from the beginning?

The other question is, what happens in general when Google finds a completely new site on my old domain, with similar or close to the same content?

Thanks,
Attila

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:12 am (utc) on May 27, 2016]
[edit reason] Replaced domain name with "example.com" - please no domain names as per ToS [/edit]

[30K_a_month]

if the site is not penalised it should be no problem.

if you have #*$! backlink profile it may be better to start again.

Again without know ing what research you have done to see what the issue is its hard to help

[lucy24]

<obligatory question which oldtimers know I have to ask at this point>
Of the various options, how would each one affect your human users?
</oq>

[tangor]

Is the change to chase after keywords or to improve the user experience for responsive/mobile? (another way of asking what lucy24 said)

These days, if an older site is still ranking well (and/or converting) there's no real advantage to what is essentially a cosmetic changeover.

In any case there will be an initial hit on rankings/traffic with a redesign and some report they never returned to previous levels.

[nahun]

thanks for your help guys! :)

it is definitely to improve user experience and yes, especially responsive and mobile.
It is only ranking well (2nd) for the keyword "widget service placename" where <placename> is the name of the district but
for "widget service" it is around the 12th while it used to be 1-3...

I made a wordpress site for a year ago for my 2nd, new widget service and now it is around 6-7th for the keyword "widget service", even if the domain is only 12 months old plus I did not put much effort on links and content, unlike in the case of my old site...

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:34 pm (utc) on May 27, 2016]
[edit reason] Exemplified keywords and placename, per forum Charter [/edit]

[Walt Hartwell]

The other question is, what happens in general when Google finds a completely new site on my old domain, with similar or close to the same content?

If you are doing a design/styling transition and content is going to remain the same on the existing domain:

When the design/styling is CSS, then I prefer to do a few pages and see how the search engines absorb it. In other words, content remains mostly the same, stylesheets in the page header point to stylesheet2.css instead of stylesheet1.css.

When the transition is from static html to a cms such as WordPress, it gets more complicated. What I have done in the past is set up WordPress in parallel to the existing site html. While it sounds complicated, WordPress probably isn't going to be using any of your existing folder or page names. While I shouldn't have to say it, backup before starting this kind of thing.
If you have an existing example.com/page1.html, in the WordPress cms, the same content can be uploaded as a page named example.com/subject-item.html. Or whatever you find suitable.
Then, using htaccess, permanent redirect example.com/page1.html to example.com/subject-item.html

You will see some drops in ranking while the search engines digest the changes, but if every page on your site is properly redirected, there won't be any long term impacts.