Thinking about redesigning a live website can be daunting, even if you’re handing the whole process over to a professional. If you’re not daunted – great – but make sure you know how to protect your content and all of the hard work you’ve put into SEO on your site.

Here are the things you absolutely need to protect at all costs:

• On-page SEO, like heading tags
• Keyworded content
• Page urls
• Images attached to pages and blog posts
• Blog post content
• Essential plugin settings & content

Before you do anything at all, make sure you’re fully backed up, content, files, database and all. If you aren’t 100% sure about your backup process, or don’t have a backup process at all (*eye twitches with anxiety*), then you need to read my blog post right now.

REDESIGN OPTIONS

When it comes to redesigning, you have four basic options and we’re going to explore all of them.

1. Redesigning on your live site ‘behind the scenes’ using a page builder.
2. Redesigning on your live site ‘behind the scenes’ using a test-drive plugin.
3. Creating a second fresh install of WordPress to use as a development or ‘dev site’.
4. Using the staging site option via your hosting (if available).

1. REDESIGNING BEHIND THE SCENES USING A PAGE BUILDER

If you’re redesigning on a live site, you can throw up a holding page and edit your live pages, but you don’t really have to, especially if you’re using a page builder or page builder theme, like Divi, ProPhoto, Showit or Elementor.

Instead, create some new pages, make sure they don’t appear in your main menu and when you’re happy with your newly designed page, save the layout ready to apply to your live page.

2. REDESIGNING BEHIND THE SCENES USING THEME TEST DRIVE PLUGIN

Alternatively, you can use a ‘theme test drive plugin’ like WP Theme Test, which allows you to show your current theme to visitors but try a new theme which only you can see when logged in.

It’s all worth noting that the ProPhoto theme includes a built-in test drive tool.

PROS OF REDESIGN ON A LIVE SITE:

• Best for updates and smaller redesigns
• No disruption for site visitors
• A good way to test a completely different theme

CONS OF REDESIGNING OF A LIVE SITE:

• If you prefer to use global styles for fonts, and want to make changes to your fonts and heading sizes, you’ll have to wait until your new pages are all in place before changing your overall font/heading settings.
• Not a good solution if you are planning a radical redesign and brand overhaul.
• If you change the content on live pages, those content changes will be seen by visitors and sometimes content changes don’t make sense in the context of the old design

3. CREATING A SECOND ‘FRESH’ INSTALL OF WORDPRESS TO USE AS A DEVELOPMENT SITE

This is my preferred option and I choose this option every time, because it gives the website a fresh start and it’s a chance to get rid of redundant plugins, old files and old fixes to core WordPress files, as well as cleaning up the database.

It’s also a lot easier to do that you might think. The first place to start is with your hosting company, where you need to check if your current hosting package allows multiple installs of WordPress. If it does, it’s usually very simple to go to your hosting control panel and find the WordPress or app installer.

The only decision you need to make is whether to install your fresh copy of WordPress onto a subdomain or into a subdirectory.

A SUBDOMAIN VS. SUBDIRECTORY?

• newsite.yourdomain.com (subdomain)
• yourdomain.com/newsite (subdirectory)

It doesn’t matter which option you choose – the end result is exactly the same. Personally, I usually opt to install the development site into a subdirectory, because it eliminates the extra step of creating and configuring the subdomain.

If you’re not sure how to install a new copy of WordPress in your hosting, watch the short video below to see how I install it using cPanel, which is a widely used hosting control panel.

PRESERVING CONTENT

With your fresh install of WordPress in place, you’ll have a blank canvas for your new design, but you will probably want to preserve content like blog posts and plugin settings and content.

Most plugins allow you to import and export settings and content, like forms, events, products and SEO content.

Exporting blog posts is even easier with the built-in WordPress import/export tool. I like to export existing blog posts into the dev site, in order to style them.

Remember, when you export blog posts from one WordPress site and import them into another, the images in the blog posts won’t be moved. The image file paths will still be pointing to your ‘live’ site, which allows you to see the images in your dev site. Later, when you migrate your shiny new site back to your live site area, the images will hook up with their file paths once again.

PROS OF CREATING A DEV SITE:

• A great chance for a fresh start, getting rid of old files and plugins and installing a new copy of WordPress
• Completely change content and design in a separate environment to your live site, eliminating the time pressure of doing a re-design
• Retain existing content like page and post content and the media library

CONS OF CREATING A DEV SITE

• Not ideal for complex sites where plugin settings can’t be preserved
• Not ideal for busy e-commerce sites where transaction history can be lost during a migration
• If keeping existing content like blog posts, you will need to download and then restore your media library files, using file management software, like Filezilla or Transmit.

4. USING YOUR HOSTING COMPANY’S STAGING OPTION

This option isn’t available to everyone, but good quality hosting companies, like Siteground (affiliate link) give you the option to create a copy of your site to a staging server, where you can make the changes you need to make. When you’re ready to ‘push your staging site to live’, you can have the choice of am ‘Easy Push’, which completely replaces your existing live site meaning anything that has happened on your live site since, will be lost.

Or you can choose ‘Advanced Push, which will find all of the changes you’ve made to the files and database of your staging site. You can then choose which of the changes you want to push to your live site. You can read more about how it works here.

A note of warning – not all hosting companies offer Advanced Push. Some only offer Easy Push which completely overwrites your live site, so do check first.

Whichever method you choose, remember to make a full backup of your live site before you do anything!

Finally, if you’re seriously contemplating a re-design, this free online workshop goes into more detail about:

• how to choose a theme & make it look good
• which key steps you need to take to preserve your SEO when redesigning your website