Responsive Design vs Dedicated Mobile Conversion

What Google is Concentrating on for 2014

1. Page load speed on mobile 2. Page load speed on mobile 3. Page load speed on mobile

Google recently announced that page load speed is going to be a major factor in the Google SEO algorithms for 2014. Google’s main focus is for our websites to be friendly on mobile phones. A big part of this is how long it takes for your pages to load on our 3G and 4G phones.

Responsive Design vs. Dedicated Mobile Design

A quick breakdown of the differences

*This is based on how WannabeMobile converts to dedicated mobile sites.

Responsive : You need to completely scrap your site and migrate it to a responsive design which is very costly and time consuming. Average page load speed on a 4G phone is 13.8 seconds

Dedicated mobile version: One day conversion of your existing site to mobile with an average page load speed on a G4 phone of 2.5 seconds… and a fraction of the cost while keeping your existing site.

Responsive : Will not render on IE8 desktop browsers or less which is over 24% of the current market. That’s a big chunk you’ll lose.

Dedicated : Your current site is left untouched and the dedicated mobile auto-conversion will work across all mobile platforms.

Responsive : Does not have a mobile redirect nor an “m” CNAME. Example. Your url on a mobile will be http://yoursite.com instead of m.yoursitecom. (no Google Mobile SEO value)

Dedicated : Your site will have a mobile redirect and your url will be m.yoursite.com. This is how the Google Mobile spider bots know it’s a mobile site which it prefers to bring to the top of its search results.

Responsive : There is only the one main site to edit SEO which is good for Google.

Dedicated : All your desktop site SEO will flow thru to the dedicated site plus an additional SEO editor because it is two separate versions. One for Google, the other for Google Mobile. (Double up on SEO!) 

Responsive : Because it is still in its infancy you can not create and position “action buttons” for mobile. 

Dedicated : You can create action buttons and place them anywhere on the mobile site you like. Action buttons increase its link usage by 61%. The action buttons are your MONEY MAKERS!

The page load time alone will keep your viewers staying on your site when using a phone which is only 4G speed. If it’s loading slow, people are going to leave. 

Responsive designs can’t strip out heavy loads like wide pictures/videos and fat CSS styling that you need for desktop viewers.

A dedicated mobile site automatically strips those down (not out) for quick page load speeds. Example a 950px wide photo automatically converts to a 300px wide photo for mobile.

Go and Convert Your Website to Dedicated Mobile Here