Browser Evolution 2014-2016: A Silent Killer

Over the course of the last few months, we’ve started to pick up our coverage of website design and actually capturing contact information from people visiting your site. You can check out the two most recent articles here:

• Going Mobile. (It’s Time for You to Redesign Your Franchise’s Website.)
• A Conversation About Franchise Landing Pages With FranchiseHelp's Experts

Ultimately, we’re focusing on these topics because we’ve started to get incredibly frustrated by the quality of the websites available for potential franchisees. (We even learned recently that one of our clients doesn’t have a website at all!)

Anyway, today I want to touch on another reason why regular website redesign is vital to presenting an excellent experience for potential franchisees – people use different browsers (Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.) over time.

Before I get into how franchise searchers browsers have evolved over time, it’s important to realize just how different the same website can look on a different browser. And since I can’t predict which browser you’re actually using right now, it’s going to be very difficult for me to show you. However, I can recommend reading any (or all) of the following articles which have fantastic examples:

• Why does my website look different on different browsers?
• WHY DOES MY WEBSITE CHANGE DEPENDING ON WHICH BROWSER I'M USING?
• Why Websites Look Different in Different Browsers
• Why does my site look different on different computers and browsers?
• My website looks horrible on different browsers... what can I do?

Stealing from the second article…

The reason this happens is because each company’s browser is written from original code with the intention of following certain standards of web design. It’s tough to get them all to line up perfectly in the way that they render web pages, so we just have to be careful in the way that we format things when building our websites.

If you weren’t keenly aware of this fact, then you likely designed your website with a specific browser in mind (in all likelihood the browser that you were using at the time.) And then here comes the rub.

Historically, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer have been our three most popular browsers here at FranchiseHelp. As you’ll see here, when you account for the three browsers together, they’ve accounted for between 70-86% of monthly traffic to FranchiseHelp:

But here’s where things start to get hairy. What happens when you consider how the split of these browsers has changed over the same 2 yearperiod?

(You can click the graph to get a bigger image)

UNBELIEVABLE!Back in 2014, you saw each browser used with almost the same frequency. Now, Chrome outpaces Internet Explorer 5:1!

Depending on when you last redesigned your site, it’s possible you did so with Internet Explorer almost exclusively in mind!

And all of this is not mention the fact that these browsers release new versions all the time, and Internet Explorer 8 is NOTHING like IE 11.

So what’s the big deal? The fact of the matter is that browser choice matters greatly to user experience. And you probably have a website that is completely blind to this fact. It’s time to invest in a new website. 2016 is here.

Interested in learning about FranchiseHelp’s lead generation programs? Click here.