What risks will we incur by changing to responsive design?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Fat Eyes Web Development: Hi!
  
  I am new to this community and have a specific question:
  
  We have recently re-programmed our website to Responsive Web Design. All the URLs have remained the same, all the content is unchanged. We have this new version sitting on a development server and are finding ourselves hesitant to make the changeover. Our rankings are great currently, and our question is whether or not there are any risks that we will incur by making this change. We would appreciate any advice on how to implement this change safely. Or if that's it's even possible to insure that there won't be ranking losses.
• 
  Brent Wildman: As long as your URL's and content are the same, you should be fine. There is no way to tell if there will be a decrease (or increase) in your rankings. Just make sure your changes still allow your site to be easily crawable and you should be good to go.
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  James Payne: Hi,
  
  We had a similar problem with a client of ours after a site redesign and after a few discussions we decided to go ahead and put it live and just see what happened. Basicaly the general result was not a lot happened, some pages ranked better and some worse but this could have been due to the natural movement of the Google index rather than anything we had done.
  
  That all said I think the answer I would give you is there are no guarantees with any changes you make. Good content is good content and should do well whether responsive or not.
  
  Good luck
  James
• 
  Simon Fryer: Hi +Fat Eyes Web Development  ;. If anything, adding a responsive design should improve performance.
  
  The only instance in which you may see a drop in performance is if any URLs are changing. ;
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  Fat Eyes Web Development: Thank you +Brent Wildman , +James Payne and +Simon Fryer . I appreciate your responses. I also left a question on Moz.com this morning and although there has only been one response, it's basically the same. But was also pointed out that some further testing the performance of the new responsive version would be wise. And making sure no added deterrents to easy crawl-ability.
  
  It does seem logical that if the content and URLs haven't changed and the performance is steady, we ought to be fine. It's definitely scary. Funny since in the past we've launched redesigns of our site without a blink and have never had bad repercussions.
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  Rick Eliason: Hey +Fat Eyes Web Development , I wonder if it would be worth comparing like-for-like page load speeds? If the responsive site requires lots of extra coding (or indeed if you have cleaned up a lot of the code on the new site) the site speed could have an effect. Could be worth checking before making the leap.
  
  However, as echoed above, chances are you will see ranking improvements with the responsive designs particularly on mobiles if it has been executed well.
  
  Rick.