Does site redesign affect earnings?

Major site re-design underway - will it be painful?

[timwestla]

I am currently doing a major overhaul of my website. I think in the long run it will help my earnings, because the current design is pretty old. Meanwhile I'm afraid the AdSense earnings will take a hit.

Does anyone know how long it will last?

Are there any strategies to help ease the transition?

The pages will all be renamed, because I'm moving from a mostly HTML format to 100% PHP. If I keep the old pages in place, but give them a lower priority in my sitemap, will that help?

Thanks in advance for any advice or tips.

[Green_Grass]

Are you asking this question from SE ( traffic) point of view? If yes, this may be the wrong forum.

But,if you redesign pages and CHANGE tested positions of ad blocks and ad placement, you may be in for a very negative surprise in terms of CTR. I am just going thru. this phase, and I am totally zapped as to what a disaster it is, putting ad blocks within borders, out of the main content.

I am back to blending...

[explorador]

1. Keep your links... respect your structure, don't loose your positioning.
2. Test ad places
3. Do not fill the new design with ads, give time to visitors to see it is a content site, not a MFA
4. redesign with content in mind, not only ads.
5. Think about the way the visitors will read your site and reach the ads...

Ive seen in my case it hurts... but the sites recover after 1 month and a half. Youll see if the search engines or visitors liked it, so if they don't, prepare to revert.

MAKE A PLAN, I have read and it is true... big SE don't quite like big changes in one day...

test and good luck

[rememberramu]

Last month I have also changed my site layout and content ... But it increases my earning .... From SEs views keep name of file as old name as long as possible . If it is not possible use 301 redirection which is SEs friendly ....

[netmeg]

When I redesign a site (assuming it's performing reasonably well in the organics) I am very careful NOT to change page names, even if I have to do some redirecting.

That said, I did a complete and total overhaul about six months ago, and earnings have been up ever since.

[Matt Probert]

Our site underwent a major redesign seven months ago. Advertising income dropped by 600% and readership by about 300%.

Be prepared for some major pain, and unless you have to redesign, DON'T!

Matt

[mixart]

I went through a minor redesign at one point and it didn't make a huge difference at all (My content was all the same, just the layout moved around) - one thing is that it's a good chance to perfect your use of standard html tags such as reserving H1 tags for words relevant to your content and the ad content you want.

The other thing is, it's a good chance to test the layout of your ads (make some of your site with ads in one place, and other pages with ads in other places). Then over time after evaluating data you can merge all pages to the better performing layout.

[Mr_Fern]

My site redesign worked in my benefit.

[ndaru]

Go slow. Perform small changes to make it easier to compare the effect on advertisement revenue (less factors involved). Always backup before conducting every change, just in case if things went ugly.

Don't worry too much about site's appearance. You may think it's not pretty, but your visitors not necessarily think so.

[potentialgeek]

Don't overhaul an entire site until you get a template tested and Adsense-optimized for a section. Do lots of tests for colors, layout, blending, number of units, etc. Then give the section a while to see if you get smartpriced before copying the format to the entire site.

p/g

[FrostyMug]

from my personal experience, do not overhaul a site unless necessary, and do not rename the pages under any circumstance (unless you're doing SEO on bad page names).

all in all, just don't do it.

[timwestla]

Thanks for all the advice. The main thing driving the redesign is the need to add some functionality that requires PHP and MySQL. Next, it has been about 5 or 6 years since I made any improvements and I personally think the design is sort of crude. On the other hand, it's making money, as-is.

Based on the comments here, I think I will try leaving the existing pages online, and add the new PHP pages in parallel. So there will be two versions of the website. That way I can phase out the old design over time.

[hairycoo]

You'd be surprised how well plain designs (e.g. no graphics or gimmicks) perform on Adsense. The current layout I use for my site averages 15-20% CTR for the large rectangle unit.

I did start out with a design that looked professional and appealing but testing showed that crude, plain design works best.

[netmeg]

I wouldn't call my site exactly crude, but the only graphics on the entire site are the ones for "Ads by Google" and the Google calendar buttons, plus an Add-It bookmark button, and I just hit a consistent $100/day on that site for the first time over this past two weeks.

[explorador]

"two versions of the site"

keeping your old pages is the way to go for seo, even if you somehow change de design. Search at this site about having two versions of a site and the implications of duplicated content.