Website redesign- change of server . What to do with old site? Keep for a while or delete right away?
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Hey Mozzers,
Two days ago, we redesigned our website and changed the server at the same time to get faster loading times.
Here is what we have done.
The old site was hosted on ipage, new site with a new design hosted on UPCLOUD. We changed the A record to the new server, uploaded a new site, submitted a new sitemap to Google Search console, 301 redirected all old URLs to new ones, most have changed a bit. Old URLs were ending with " .html "the new ones do not have that at the end. Submitted AMP pages to Google as well.
Now here is my question. Should we delete the old site completely from ipage or should we keep it for a while? Google has indexed the new URLs that were created with the redesign, these URLs did not exist on the old site. But it still shows most of the old URLs on SERPs (these are URLs that have been 301 redirected to a new equivalent page)
I understand 2 days is not very long for Google to get everything right, but I am not sure what we should do with the old site? Keep it or get rid of it to help Google index the new one only. FYI every single old URL that appears on Google search when clicked on will take you to the right place, we made sure there are no 404s at all. As this is very important to our business and we get most of it from Google I want to make sure we do it right for SEO purposes. The agency that designed the site did not really know the answer to that question, as they do not have SEO specialists. Please help, any input you might have will be greatly appreciated.
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Keep it for a short-time in case something was overlooked. I also like to keep the 301's in place for the reason that there maybe an external site linking to the .html pages. If the 301's are not in place, these links will 404. Good luck!
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I'd keep the old site for a good 6 months just to ensure all the redirects are digested. I would ask if you used the change of address tool in search console, but I don't think that's relevant if you didn't move domain
The reason that the old URLs when listen on Google, take you to the right place on the new site - is that you have 301 redirects in place. Really you want to wait until Google removes all of your old URLs from their listings, replacing them with the new URLs. At that point it's pretty safe to kill the 301s
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