Waikato Business News February/March 2020

26 WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS February/March 2020
How a website upgrade
could kill your business
THE DIGITAL WORLD
> BY JOSH MOORE
Josh Moore is the head marketing fanatic at Duoplus, a
Hamilton-based digital marketing agency that helps clients
across NZ grow faster. www.duoplus.nz
Just like cars, you can tell an old website
when you see one. But when it comes to
upgrading your site, there’s a common
mistake that can severely hurt your business.
A
couple of years ago
we had to resuscitate
a company’s website
rankings after their previous
web design company launched
an upgrade to their website
that went horribly wrong.
The worst part was that the
big mistake wasn’t even visible.
The new website actually
looked good – both on desktop
and mobile devices. The pages
loaded fast and had been built
on a modern platform.
But there was a problem
behind the scenes that almost
killed the business.
The big problem was that
all the URLs of their website
pages had changed with the
launch of the new site. It’s
common for URLs to change
with website upgrades, but
on this particular upgrade
even the home page URL had
changed. (The home page
previously looked like www.
example.co.nz/home and was
now www.example.co.nz).
This shouldn’t have been
a problem, as it can be solved
by setting up a “redirect” for
each old URL. This means
that whenever someone tries
to view the old page they are
immediately redirected to the
new page, without even noticing.
However, the crucial mistake
was that the previous
web design company forgot to
set up these redirects – which
is common mistake. That’s
where things got messy.
Whenever someone went
directly to the domain name,
the website worked perfectly.
But whenever someone
searched on Google and then
clicked a link to the site, Google
sent them to the old page
URL and the user saw a “Page
Not Found” error message.
This meant that all of their
traffic from Google could no
longer see a working website
– they just saw the error
page. Very quickly the phone
stopped ringing with new
inquiries. It was killing the
business.
An extra tricky part of the
equation is that when the client
viewed their Google Analytics
reports, the traffic still
looked strong. It was only the
following month that their
traffic from Google (“organic
traffic”) plummeted. They
engaged us to urgently investigate.
The reason their Analytics
statistics still looked strong
after the new website launch
was because anyone who sees
a “Page Not Found” error is
still counted in Analytics as
a website visitor. It’s only
when you dig into the data further
then you can see that the
page they’re viewing is called
“Page Not Found”. So the
overall visitor numbers gave
the false impression the traffic
was fine.
Google doesn’t want to
give users a bad user experience
when they click on links,
so after a few weeks of the site
still showing errors, Google
then removed all of the old
URLs from its results. This is
what caused the dramatic drop
in organic traffic the following
month, as the old URLs
were removed from Google’s
results and the new URLs
were buried on page 2 or 3
(or worse). Even with active
search engine optimisation
work, it took many months to
recover the rankings.
So, if you’re planning on a
website upgrade, I recommend
talking to your web development
company about these
two crucial points:
Firstly, make sure they
have a thorough plan for
implementing redirects for all
pages that receive regular traffic
from Google. The bigger
the site, the more crucial this
is.
We launched a large ecommerce
upgrade for a client last
year and made sure that that
every product, product category
and content page had
redirects from the old URLs to
the new ones – 1751 redirects
in total! This meant that every
website visitor was redirected
to the correct product instead
of ending up on an error page.
It also meant that the strong
website rankings the old site
had achieved were retained by
the new site.
Secondly, be sure to discuss
who will be responsible
for monitoring any URLs that
give “Page Not Found” errors,
and then add redirects to fix
those errors. Fixing the URLs
fast is important for keeping
your organic traffic strong.
Website upgrades are well
worth doing. Just be sure to
apply these two steps to avoid
the nightmare of a website
upgrade killing your business.
Fun with History:
Waikato Waldorf School
Medieval Carnival 2020
Miro House Kindergarten
Providing holistic, contemporary and lifelong
Waldorf Education in an inspiring environment
now and into the future.
“Receive the child in Reverence,
Educate the child in Love,
Let each go forth in Freedom.”
– Rudolf Steiner
Miro House Kindergarten provides a
warm and secure homely environment
where childhood is honoured and
children are given the gift of time. Within
this environment the physical, emotional,
social, and spiritual nature of each child is
carefully nurtured through daily activities,
free play and strong rhythms.
We aim to develop children’s early
learning naturally, and we do
this very purposefully through daily
activities, each with an impulse and
purpose aligned to the developmental
stages of the child.
Every year in autumn the
parents in the Waikato
Waldorf community create
an atmosphere that takes
you back in time… where the
wider community can come
and experience what it was
like to live in medieval times.
This carnival is a unique event
in Hamilton’s calendar, and is
popular with a large spectrum
of people outside the Waldorf
community.
The carnival has just about
everything imaginable to interest
children and adults, from
sword fighting, sword making,
metalworking, pottery, activities
such as jewelery making
and panning for crystals, to
live entertainment, wholesome
home-baked goodies and beautiful
handcrafts for sale. We
have a lot of regular visitors to
the carnival, with the Pirongia
Clydesdales ride and James the
Blacksmith being two of the
most popular draw-cards.
There is a special area
where only children can shop
with a beautiful fairy in attendance
to help the children
choose something special at
special child prices. There’s
a mysterious witches’ cavern
where the brave can make
potions to make their wishes
come true, and face painting
to match your dreams. In addition,
our wooden horse Gwendolyn
is unique in Waikato,
with a thrilling ride available to
the keen youngsters.
Every year a medieval
encampment is on site for the
weekend, with knights, camp
fires and battles. With the parents,
students and staff dressing
in costume this carnival is truly
a magical way to time travel
back to the medieval period.
To find out more about the
school visit www.waikatowaldorf.school.nz
- Supplied copy
Enquiries welcome
07 855 8711 eceprincipal@waikatowaldorf.school.nz
85 Barrington Drive, Huntington, Hamilton 3210
www.waikatowaldorf.school.nz
203664AA