Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?

[hpk]

Hello,

I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords.

Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change  everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc.

Now my question is:

1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net?

2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how  will search engine bots take this?

3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal?

Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php.

Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.

[benseb]

I'd recommend you run some A/B tests. In our experience with site revamps, it's best to ensure your visitors are happy first, whcih you can measure using conversion rates.

If you notice a big dip in conversions, something may be broken which could then have a knock-on effect with your rankings.

From a massive revamp we recently did to make things responsive (1.5M pges) we noticed an increase in most of our rankings.

But just remember - treat google as a mobile user, so if  you start simple and progressively add more content via ajax as the screen size increases, remember google may not pick these up, it will see your 'simplest' page, so make sure you don't remove any important on-page factors.

[DirkC]

Hi,

I did several major site migrations in recent months and if you get the basics right, there should be no (negative) impact on your rankings. It's a myth that site migrations always lead to a drop in rankings. Changing technology should not have an impact - Google is all about the user experience, not about the technology used to create the user experience. Having a responsive site should increase your traffic (and rankings).

Not affiliated to them - but as already indicated by Travis a tool like Screaming Frog (the paid version) is almost a pre-requisite for a successful migration.

The main thing you should take care of is that all your current url's are properly redirected to avoid 404's after migration. You indicate that the url's are not going to change so this should be no problem. To be sure - crawl your current website with a tool (like ScreamingFrog) to get the full list of url's. Export the list of url's & replace the current domain with your test domain and crawl the responsive version based on this list. Check if all url's return a 200 status (if they return a 301 - check if the redirected url's return a 200 status). As a side effect, crawling your current site could also show you other areas of improvement like images that are too heavy, endless loops, unbalanced site structure, etc. If you encounter issues with your current site - try to solve them with the migration.

Compare the main on-page items between the two sites (H1, page title, metadescription) - in your case they should be identical (if you use ScreamingFrog this is a pretty basic task - just export the craw results to xls & see if they match)

Crawl your new site - check if the number of pages crawled is identical (or close) to the number of pages crawled on the current site. Screamingfrog allows you to see the site structure - compare it with your current site, to be sure that important content is not pushed deeper into your site.

Use a tool like webpagetest.org to check the speed of your site - both for your current site and your new site to be sure that with the new designs you are not slowing down your site - do this for a number of typical pages on your site (hint: look at your most popular landing pages in Analytics). Do the same checks with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - see if you improve the results with your new responsive site. Your score for mobile should be a lot better - if not - you did something wrong with your re-design.

For your most important pages (probably your most important landing pages / most visited pages) - do some visual checks between old & new site - is all the content present, does it look ok, ...etc.

I don't know if you get a lot of traffic from image search (check your webmastertools). If this is the case: if the url's and/or the names of the images change - make sure that the 'old' images remain accessible under the old url (in my experience it takes a bit longer for google to update the index for Image search).

Make sure that your sitemap is updated when migrating. Probably you block your test site for indexing - don't forget to remove this when putting your new site online.

After migration, check your webmastertools for 404's - idem for Google Analytics. Correct 404's as fast as possible (make sure that your 404 page is tagged in Analytics).

To answer your point 3 - if something goes wrong during migration, in my experience you should count on approx. 3 months for recovery, but with no guarantee that you'll return to previous positions, so better make sure that you get the points above right from the start.

Good luck with the migration!

[Travis_Bailey]

Why not just adopt WordPress? ; ) I generally don't work with the .Net platform in the wild, unless I'm prospecting. You may or may not believe some of the crazy things that platform does out of the box. So make sure to get a full crawl of the site and sort out any issues prior to dev work. I recommend Screaming Frog in most instances. But if you have a gigantic site and/or you may not be able to identify problems readily, you may find Deep Crawl worth the price.

At any rate, just make sure you have a pre and post launch crawl for comparison. That alone can save you hours of time, should something go a awry. If nothing else the crawls will help a consultant, should you need one in the future.

Since you're making major site changes, it's also a good idea to get some site speed benchmarks. (Get benchmarks under various traffic loads, if possible.) It's possible that you can end up with a slower site, even though it's responsive. There are a number of ways that can happen, but at least you'll know if you have a speed problem.

I recommend GTmetrix and Pingdom for the above tasks. Here are some really simple fixes from Feed The Bot that should help with speed, once you're on an Apache server.

Just remember, redesigns are a great time to catch any loose ends you 'didn't have time for' or were 'minor problems'. Those minor problems stack up to considerable wins, once they're righted. You're on the right path with a responsive redesign. Remember to preserve the source order of the site between versions (desktop, mobile, tablet) as much as possible. That will help with the speed as well.

[CandymanKen]

Hi-

If the page content is the same is the url structure is the same, I don't suspect you'll see too much, if any, damage. You might even do better because you went responsive.  Just be careful to make sure of things like placement of the title tag, etc, and your stylings (H1, etc) are similar to where they were before.

Good Luck

Ken