I have created a WP theme and have already updated most of my sites. But I have a problem with one of my sites where I had a steady daily organic traffic for 5 years, then Google took 50% of my traffic, and suddenly, 1.5 years ago, the traffic came back. I am afraid to lose it again. My actual traffic is between 120 and 180 daily organic. The organic traffic is not only to my posts but also to my homepage. My updated WP theme has a very similar layout for posts and categories. But it has a completely different structure for my homepage. This is my current site: MexicanRoutes/.com And this is my new WP theme I want to use for this site: RivieraMayaTravelGuide/.com What can I do to not losing my site's ranking and position? I can create a homepage with a design similar to the current homepage. The new WP theme was created only because I wanted a clean and my own theme, not because I don't like the current design. But I would prefer a new design for the front page as well. Should I create a new design for the front page and keep all the elements and text from the current front page?
Almost 800 views and zero comments 800 views and 0 help. People write spammy posts about SEO and how clever they are, but the moment you ask for advice, everyone goes offline. Finally, I created the homepage template like on the old site and activated the new theme. I still need to regenerate the gallery to fix the wrong dimensions of images in sidebars on single posts, and that will take a few days at least. Then I can create a draft and experiment with the homepage design there without it interfering with the live site.
Changing themes can affect your website's SEO (sometimes it does and sometimes it just has a minor impact). I checked your website's current theme and the theme you want to have now. The current theme has a different layout and the new theme has some scripts added to it for the other layout. These scripts can affect the rendering and SEO. Heading structure is also changed in the new theme. What should you do to keep SEO safe (not 100%, but it can impact a little)? Keep the same layout for the home page (for 1 or 2 weeks to test it) If you want to keep the newer version for the homepage, keep the old content, internal links, and heading structure, meta tags and schema markup. Optimize it for Core Web Vitals, especially for the Home page. (Pay attention to the CLS, LCP and FID. Preserve the same URLs and URL structure. Optimize xml sitemap Optimize the robots.txt file. Do not forget to take the old website backup before proceeding further. Your current website is mobile-friendly, so pay attention while switching to the new theme (it must be responsive too). Check the Analytics, which page users visit the most and try to keep the same design or a similar one so the users can easily navigate to your website.
Thanks. I can’t revert to the old version anymore. I do have backups and can restore everything in case of an emergency. But I can’t just switch the theme back with a single click. This is the old version of my site: https://web.archive.org/web/20250317072514/https://mexicanroutes.com/ I wanted to make it look like this site: https://rivieramayatravelguide.com/ I’ve already activated the new theme. This is my site now: https://mexicanroutes.com/ To avoid a sudden and drastic change, I created a homepage template for the new theme that’s similar to the old site’s homepage design. Now, I’ll wait a few months while I continue testing the site with the new theme and fixing minor issues (regenerate gallery etc). Eventually, I want the homepage to look like this: https://rivieramayatravelguide.com/ I think I need to keep all the current elements and adapt them to the new homepage design. I’ve created a layout sketch to follow. Am I right? Because I think that if I remove even one line of text from the old design, it could affect my SEO. I didn’t understand what you meant. What scripts are you referring to? Do you mean the heading structure? Are you talking about the whole site, or just the homepage? So, by now, the new theme is already activated. I will wait a few months to be sure the site is running smoothly. And only then will start to redesign the Homepage.
I was talking about the JS libraries. It will block your website rendering and also slow down the website loading time. And, I mentioned it to check so you can avoid any serious SEO issues.
I have some JS for the homepage slider and a few more elements. I don't think the site is rendering too badly. https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-mexicanroutes-com/ovgl75oggl?form_factor=mobile https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-mexicanroutes-com/ovgl75oggl?form_factor=desktop I will learn later how to optimize it, but currently the site is working even better than with the old theme. The problem is how to move all elements from the current homepage to a new layout.
After changing the theme, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo lost about 1/3 of their organic traffic, but they are already recovering and regaining it. However, Google lost between 80% and 90%... Google is the most useless search engine, it doesn't search for pages but does who knows what instead. All my URLs remained the same, the code was improved and cleaned up, but Google seems to be busy comparing class name changes, divs, and other things it shouldn't even be concerned with.