Hi,
Sorry if this is a silly question but I can’t seem to find a definitive answer online. I have built a few WordPress sites for small buisnesses as a bit of a side gig. Nothing crazy and more to just give them an online presence. (I am more into the graphic design field, but trying to expand.)
A family friend has a dated webpage for his buisness that is entirely coded and would like to update it. It’s not an ecommerce site, but his buisness is pretty large and gets a fair bit of traffic from potential clients. I think he imagined it would be pretty simple to update his existing site to look less dated, but having tracked down the original developer and spoken to him, we both agreed the only real way to do that is to completely rebuild the site on WordPress and transfer the existing domain across once completed.
I imagine the bulk of the content will stay the same, just the design will change – althought I will optimise for SEO as I don’t believe that has ever been done.
My question is: does transfering the domain to a new build affect the rankings negatively? Will google think it is an entirely new site? Luckily the buisness is quite niche with very few competitors but I would not want to tank their rankings. Or is there anything else I should consider?
I am thinking this may be a larger/more expensive project than they had hoped for and than I can commit to currently anyway, but I just wanted to give them a full overview when discussing.
Thanks!
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