Just How Important Is Responsive Design And CDN To SEO?

Google’s recent algorithm changes place increasing importance on mobile-oriented content. As such, taking steps to ensure your website is built with a responsive design that will adapt to all screens - computer, tablet, and smartphone alike - is a critical part of SEO strategy. Beyond this, it’s also important to remember site speed still plays a role in overall ranking, so taking steps to improve page load speed matters, too.

Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update took place on April 21, 2015. At first, it didn’t seem like too big of a deal, but according to a report from Adobe Systems, the impact was much greater than originally anticipated. That report, which tracked traffic to more than 5,000 sites, divided into mobile-friendly and non-mobile friendly categories, showed that traffic to non-mobile sites fell by 12% in the months after the change took place. Google offers a mobile-friendly tool to let you test whether or not they see your website as mobile-friendly, so clearly it is important.

The Impact of Site Slowdowns

Lenny Rachitsky, founder of Search Guy, once said, “Downtime is better for a B2C web service than slowness. Slowness makes you hate using the service, downtime you just try again later.”

According to Web Performance Today, a one second delay in page load time translates to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Sounds a little scary, right? Translate that to dollars for the real fright. If your website makes $50,000 a day, this translates to a 1.25 million loss in sales, every year.

Web Performance Today also shares some interesting data for various online merchants. By cutting load time in half, AutoAnything.com was able to increase sales by 13%. SmartFurniture.com speed up their page load time and saw 20% more organic traffic, and `4% more page views, which in turn increased sales.

What You Can Do to Improve Site Speed

Beyond following good design principles to keep the code lean and file sizes in line, one of the best things you can do is implement a content delivery network (CDN). This sets up copies of your website on multiple servers, and serves the content to your website visitor from the closest server to them. For example, if you're running a website from Los Angeles, and your visitor comes to you from China, the website will load slower simply because of the distance between the servers. Using a CDN means you can have your content served from a server in China, where the distance ensures a faster load time. On average, websites using a CDN are 50% faster and exhaust less bandwidth.

Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to analyze a website’s page speed and get recommendations as to how to improve overall page speed. Minify your HTML, CSS, and Javascript with various tools such as the PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension for HTML and YUI Compressor for CSS and Javascript.

How Responsive Design Helps

Responsive design not only helps address the mobile-friendly component by making sure your website looks great no matter what screen it is viewed on, it also shrinks the file sizes accordingly. When file sizes are appropriate for the device they are viewed on, the overall site speed will increase. Ultimately, mobile media time is now greater than desktop and other media, so you’ll need to make changes to your design to account for mobile traffic increases.

By taking the time to make adjustments to your website’s design and code to account for responsiveness and speed, you can see major gains in terms of traffic and conversions, and a decreased bounce rate. Test where you are now, and do what you can to increase page load time. Watch your analytics data to see the impact of those changes, and over time, you’ll see improvement overall.