Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Possible to Migrate Website Design to Different Theme?
-
Last year we purchased a $79 them and coded a new designer our real estate website. The database of listings was transferred to the new theme.
A year later we realize the new theme is not that fast; does not perform great, so despite optimizing our server we are not getting very fast performance.
So, my question is, can we take the design, the CSS of our current theme (and database) and transfer it to a better performing theme? We are in a very competitive niche and our website must perform quickly both desktop and mobile.
If this is feasible is this a major production? Note we are very happy with the design and this would solely be to improve download speeds to improve the user experience and get better ranking.
Thanks,
Alan
-
Hi Pat:
Thanks for your answer/response! Our URL is www.metro-manhattan.com
To answer your questions:
1. When we moved the site to a new theme/database the URL structure did not change. However, about a year before we migrated to a new domain and and went HTTP to HTTPS (secure) so there are redirects. 301 redirects were used.
2. All the on page optimization moved when we changed themes.
3. Yes, there are some unnecessary URLs, but they are managed by robot.txt.
4. Gzip compression/caching/cdn has been implemented to speed up site. My SEO provider is constantly adjusting but the site is not particularly fast.
If we were to custom develop the same functionality without purchasing a theme, would the performance (Google Page Speed, GT Metrix) be much better?
If we are satisfied with the structure, design and functionality of our site, is custom coding a costly venture?
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Alan,
Before moving theme again, have a look at the current situation.
With site migrations/template changes there are a few things to note:
-
when your listings where moved to new DB, did the URL structure change, is so did they use 301 redirects ?
-
when you moved template, did all the onpage optimization move with the template. (Titles, Descriptions, content, image naming, image descriptions).
-
indexation, does the new template output any extra/unesscary urls ? If so they need to be managed by robots.txt
-
Have gzip compression/caching/cdn been implemented to speed up site?
Most likely there is work that could be done to improve with going to purchase another theme. In my own experience purchased themes tend to be heavier & in some cases quite code heavy oppose to custom dev which Focuses on using less resources to make things work,
Hopefully some the above helps, without rebuilding the site.
pat
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
What is the difference between Multilingual and multiregional websites?
Hi all, So, I have studied about multilingual and multiregional websites. As soon as possible, we will expand the website languages to english and spanish. The urls will be like this: http://example.com/pt-br
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mobic
http://example.com/en-us
http://example.com/es-ar Thereby, the tags will be like this: Great! But my doubt is: To /es-ar/ The indexing will be only to spanish languages in Argentina? What about the other countries that speak the same language, like Spain, Mexico, etc.I don't know if it will be possible develop a Spanish languages especially for each region. Should I do an multiregional website or only multilingual? How Google sees this case? Thanks for any advice!!1 -
Website copying in Tweets from Twitter
Just noticed a web developer I work with has been copying tweets into the website - and these are displayed (and saved) one page at a time across hundreds of pages (this is so they can populate a twitter feed, I am told). How would you tackle this, now that the deed's been done? This is in Drupal. Your thoughts would be welcome as this is a new one to me. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Targeting different countries with domain name
Hi currently have a eCommerce store .com.au targeting Australia. We want to start targeting the US market with the same products. I guess what would be the top choice in this case since our domain is location-specific to Australia and not a generic top-level domain (gTLD)? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain? Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bloomnation0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0