I manage about 30 company websites with Joomla 1.5, 2.5, 3.4.
The reason why I did not migrate 1.5 and 2.5 to 3.4 is because the owners didn't want to invest in rebuilding their websites from scratch due to high code customization or unaivailability of the components, etc.
Now on the 21th april Google will strongly downrank all the non mobile friedly website. See for example this article
I know that the website owners will notice a loss on the page views and anyway I want to be correct and inform them about that.
I also know that it will be a nightmare to make 1.5 and 2.5 version responsive also considering the components like ecommerce or flash flipping books.
Being a freelance and working alone, I feel I'll not be able to change all the sites for the 21th april, and I really don't have a strategy.
What do you think will be the best practice to face that change? Should I ignore Google and carry on or start developing responsive templates even if I don't know if I will succeed? (Think about a Joomla 1.5 website with Virtuemart ecommerce and many other obsolete components that are NOT responsive ready).
The main problem is that site owners never want to invest on their sites, they want to spend less possible and they never seem to understand the effort that takes even if I try to explain at best that I can.
I already know since now that the proposal to invest in rebuilding the website to a new modern performing version will be unacceptable to some client.
Thanks for any suggestion.