I have a photobooth company that searches very well in my region. It's on a very old Joomla platform and I would like to update it. Do I risk losing my high search ranking by doing so?
It is likely that you'll forget a few steps if you haven't done it before and if you don't have a solid website redesign SEO checklist.
If you miss out on a few critical things after you launch the redesign, these will harm the rankings:
-Forgetting to update robots.txt if you disallow search engines
-Forgetting to remove the noindex for pages you DO want in the index
-Not redirecting your important pages if you change URLs
-Letting important pages accidentally 404
-Not looking at all the elements helping important pages rank before making drastic changes
There's probably 50-100 items to check off if you're managing an important redesign for an important site.
If your site doesn't bring in much search traffic and you've got nothing to lose, then the risk is much smaller.
If your site is critical to your business, and you're making tons of changes, then there are some big risks there, so do some research or hire an expert to get it right!
Feel free to ping me or request a call if you have any follow-up questions, as I've done about 20 of these and so I have a huge checklist of my own to manage this process.
