Is it worth changing themes to be Responsive, and risk a SERP change?
-
I've got a site that ranks #1 for it's term. It's Worpress on Thesis 1.85. The site is not responsive and cannot be because Thesis 1x is not (and Thesis 1x is a dead end). I really would like my site responsive, but I fear changing things might affect my #1 rank.
The least impactful change I could do is move to Thesis 2.x, but I have come to really dislike the company and hate to get locked in again. There are other frameworks I would prefer to move to, but their impact on my pages' source would be much more.
So, my question is, is it worth moving to a new theme (keeping the layout looking exactly the same, although the "source" would look different) just to make the site responsive? Is it that important?
-
Hi bizzer,
Everyone should ideally have a mobile-friendly website, because the percentage of people accessing your site on mobile devices will only continue to increase. And if you already have a Wordpress site, switching to a responsive theme is a great way to achieve that. But...as you note, there are other considerations, such as potentially lost rankings.
Only you know how much of a drop you can afford. It's a short-term sacrifice for long-term results.
Generally speaking, my recommendation would always be that if you can possibly do it, you should. And Miki and Moosa made some good suggestions above for how to minimise the negative impact somewhat. Combined with good technical SEO going into the new source code, you should hopefully be able to regain your position fairly quickly.
To answer your follow-up question: we don't know for sure, but it seems likely that having a mobile-friendly website could be a quality factor, whether now or later. Google have certainly discussed best practice guidelines for mobile, which seems to indicate that a good mobile experience is something which they care about. Apart from anything else, ~60% of mobile users will bounce if they land on a non-mobile-friendly site and go to a competitor, so that in itself will send a negative signal if you have a significant amount of mobile traffic. (and 15-20% isn't too shabby - even if some of that is tablet traffic, a responsive design will provide a better experience for them as well).
Hope that helps!
-
Well, I have about 15-20% coming from mobile devices. However not all of them are phone-size, some are ipad size. But I'm sure the number will be growing.
But let me ask this follow-on question. At the moment, I'm more concerned with how my site ranks in desktop Google, rather than mobile Google. So, in order to help make my decision, does having a website that is responsive, also help my desktop SERP position? I know it does not directly affect it, but perhaps it might indirectly, as Google could use it as a quality factor. You know, like "hey this site isn't even mobile, let's take a few points off the ranking score on desktop." They are always trying to calculate which are the quality sites, the ones that the owner is serious about.
-
It will depend on your industry and what type of customers you are looking to target. If making the site responsive will cause a strong influx of traffic to the website (i.e. if many of your users are from a mobile device), it may be worth the move. It is important to remember that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. The long term results of changing your website may be worth the sacrifice of a short lived top ranking.
Whenever the topic of possibly sacrificing current position for future growth potential arises, you must first evaluate how beneficial can a move like this be? Will it attract a market that has been neglected up until now? and if it does drop in rankings how will that affect revenue and are you in the right position to regain your spot on top?
Two important things to remember in preparation of a change like this is:
1. Make backups of your site as insurance.
2. Try to gain as many quality links and boost your social media presence as much as possible before the change. This will help regain the top spot if it does hurt the ranking.Hope this helped!
-
I would first start by looking at how much of your visitors are on mobile devices and then base my decision on that.
-
Whenever I stuck with such a situation on my client’s side I usually prefer to make changes in order to make website design a more responsive and user friendly because in the longer run Google and other search engines are actually working on tracking the HQ website that should be loved by users...
But before implementing the final changes makes a website promotional plan in terms of social and getting more quality links to the website... this way if you lose the first spot chances are that will be for temporary period only and you will regain your position within days and weeks!
Hope this helps!
-
There is no set defined answer really. There are a few factors and each case will be different. Ultimately, it will come to a trade off on whether you feel the update will bring you enough value to the possibility of losing the top spot.
One comparison may be to value how much the SEO would cost to bring it back to the number 1 spot after a fall verses how much not changing will affect your business.
Please ensure that you have backed up EVERYTHING. Data corruption always hits the unexpected.
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
-
Organic Landing Page Changes Repeatedly
Hello, We are selling bee products online in Germany. Our star product and the most important keyword is propolis. For this keyword, our landing page has changed several times between 2 product pages and a content page about propolis. For a short time, the landing page was homepage. We also have a Propolis category page which consists of propolis products. For this page, most of the internal and external links have the anchor text propolis. But the category page never ranked for this keyword. Product, category and informational pages all have content over 1500 words. Does anyone have an idea why the landing page change this much? Also, what can we do to stabilize and optimize the landing page? Thanks! qksc61
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozzzge0 -
Is there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
Author Byline in Page Title in SERP
I was exploring my company's visibility in Google News results, and I noticed the author byline in a recently published article was being pulled into the page title in the SERP. See the attached image for a screenshot. It makes it sound awkward: "How to Find the Best Cannabis Experience and High for You Patrick..." - as if we're explaining it to some guy named Patrick? We have the byline the same way in all other posts, but this is the first I've seen this happen. Has anyone seen/had this happen, and if so, have any ways to prevent it? Thanks in advance for any insights! Here's the post URL: https://www.leafly.com/news/cannabis-101/how-to-find-best-cannabis-experience-high csvmF
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
Is it possible to migrate to a new domain name without negatively impacting SEO? Our existing domain name (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) is a bit spammy. It has been used for almost 10 years. We would like to migrate it to www.metro-manhattan.com. The metro-manhattan domain has been registered about 5 years and it redirects to the nyc-officespace-leader.com domain. The nyc-officespace-leader.com has a domain authority of 23 and a page authority of 32. The metro-manhattan domain has a domain authority of 7 and a page authority of 23. Is it possible to make this transition without losing domain authority and page rank? I would think that having two domains might loo spammy to Google and this change would be a positive in the long term. We do understand that the redirects for each page would need to be done carefully. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Safely change canonical URL many times
Hi, We are actually working on a new product information section for our network of websites (site A, B, C and D) where product landing pages allow to download information in pdf format and are active for downloads during a period of two months (active form for commercial reasons) with a unique URL (the case today). Here is a possible scenario for these product landing pages in the near future: Product is promoted in website A during 2 months (January to February) so canonical URL = A/page. Once expired, the product info. download form disappears. Customer decides to promote the same product in the same site A as well in site B from April to May so canonical URL will still be A/page. Canonical URL of B/page will point to A/page. Customer decides to relaunch his product promotion this time in site C from July to August so canonical URLs of pages A/page and B/page will now point to C/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form At the end of the year the customer does another campaign for the same product this time in website D so we will change the canonical URL of pages A/page, B/page and C/page to D/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form The obvious question here is: will this way of changing canonical URLs dynamically hurt the SEO of the section, pages, one particular website or the whole network ? Would it be better and safer to just keep the first canonical URL forever? A/page in this example Thanks so much for your input on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulienLetellier0 -
CHange insite Urls structure
Hello Guys! I have a situation with a website and I need some opinions. Today, the structured of my site is: (I have had this site architecture since many years) Main country home (www.mysite.com.tld) o Product_1 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product1/) § Product_1 articles www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_art1 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_art2 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product1_artx o Product_2 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product2/) § Product_2 articles www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_art1 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_art2 www.mysite.com.tld/product1/product2_artx I have several TLDs with their main and their products. We are thinking in modify this structure and begin to use subdomains for each product (The IT guys need this approach because is simpler to distribute the servers load). I not very friendly with subdomains and big changes like this always can produce some problem (although the SEO migration would be ok, problems could appear, like ranking drops), But, the solution (the reasons are technical stuff), requires the mix of directories and subdomains in each product, leaving the structured in this way: Main country home (www.mysite.com.tld) o Product_1 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product1/) § Product_1 articles product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_art1 product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_art2 product1.mysite.com.tld/product1_artx o Product_2 Home (www.mysite.com.tld/product2/) § Product_2 articles product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_art1 product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_art2 product2.mysite.com.tld/product1_artx So, the product home will be in a directory buy the pages of the articles of this product will be in a subdomain. What do you think about this solution? Beyond that the SEO migration would be fine, 301s, etc, can bring us difficulties in the rankings or the change can be done without any consideration? Thanks very much! Agustin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTeamDespegar0 -
Change of web hosting?
Does change of web hosting have any effects on a websites SEO?and what are the factors that need to be taken care off while changing web hosting company in terms of seo perspective.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0