You Loose 50% Visitors Everyday - Did you know?

browser compatabilty issueHabit often ruin many things in life and same goes for habits related to web designing. Every single month we see new versions of browsers. Technology is changing rapidly and so comes the website compatibility issue. With latest web technologies like CSS3, AJAX, JQuery and HTML5, more brilliant designs are emerging which look outstanding and can't easily be resisted unless you apply them to your web design. Keeping your blog or site clean in design is a good thing but if you are viewing your website in major browsers after every new design change that you make, then you are on a safe side else you may be unknowingly loosing half of your website visitors due to Browser support technical problems.

 

What is Browser Compatibility Issue?

Compatibility means whether or not the web design looks the same on all browsers or if your website is loading fine on all browsers or not. There are four widely used browsers which are

  1. Mozilla
  2. Internet Explorer (IE)
  3. Chrome
  4. Safari (Macintosh)
  5. Opera (MOBILE)

Browsers which users prefer using on their desktop computers are the first 4 and the Opera is normally preferred on handsets like NOKIA for fast browsing ability. All these browsers are different in their algorithms because they belong to separate corporations and developers. What looks fine and neat on Mozilla can look horrible on IE9. What looks good in Mozilla can look distorted in Opera. IE sucks big time for many reasons. Versions older than IE8 didn't support PNG image format as a result the image background would look dull and ugly. Latest CSS3 and HTML5 don't work as efficiently with IE8 as it does with Chrome and Mozilla. You can not create rounded borders or add box shadow effect in IE8 as you can in other browsers.

How can it Effect traffic?

Web traffic for each site differs. The widely used world browsers are Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Since the biggest operating system is Windows by Microsoft therefore majority of computer users have IE installed by default and majority users are too lazy to upgrade to a better Browser.

Following is the chart displaying annual report of our visitors who view this blog using different browsers.

PAGEVIEWS BY BROWSERS

You can view clearly that around 16% visitors use Internet Explorer to view MBT. Suppose if our blog did not load quickly or neatly then we could have lost precious amount of our daily traffic.  16% loss means loss of precious Page Impressions and hence AdSense Revenue.

In May 2011, this blog was loosing 30% of its traffic from IE8 due to a "Website Abortion Error".  I had installed a search box form lijit on this blog and it worked just fine in Mozilla and chrome but I did not had the habit of checking it in IE. At the end of the month when I check my analytics, I was shocked when I found out that we were receiving no traffic from IE. I opened IE to see what's wrong and found that the blog did not load at all. It would give an error and then the browser would crash. It took me around 2 days to find out the cause of this error. You can read in detail in that post how we debugged our blog template and removed the widget which was causing the entire blog to crash on IE.

How To Ensure your blog is Browser Compatible?

The best way to do this is to keep the tips I shared on IE Abortion Error Solved and these new precautions:

  1. View your Blog in Mozilla, Chrome and then IE8
  2. If it looked good in Mozilla and Chrome but not in IE, then use CSS conditional classes.
  3. Always view your blog in IE after making a change to your blogspot template
  4. If it showed a problem in loading then its better to avoid that widget

Apply these tips along with the detailed version on my previous posts to stay safe and maintain receiving traffic from all major browsers without loosing a single visitor. No need to use W3C validators because they will never tell you that you did well rather they will always show errors on errors.

Hope this may prove helpful in better understanding why your traffic from some browsers like IE is low. Do let me know if you needed some technical help in making your stylesheet compatible with conditional ID statements. Peace pals. :)

If you don't want to get yourself into Serious Technical Trouble while editing your Blog Template then just sit back and relax and let us do the Job for you at a fairly reasonable cost. Submit your order details by Clicking Here »

15 comments

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  1. no...i did not:)
    I use opera,i am a minority here:(only 3% ?

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  2. vey nice Mohammad.Lovely posts.your blog is receiving handsome traffic

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  3. Surely great post, Thanks! But, I ain't agree with you? Because, there are so many people who use tor browser for visiting blocked site. Why do they apply various tricks to visit those blocked sites? Because, these sites are so important to them.
    Similarly, when a blog became so important (like your blog) then browser can't be a matter for losing visitors. Not me, They have to choose the browser which is suitable for your blog.
    Am i right sir ?

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  4. one thing more Mohammad. you can motivate people to use your favourite
    browser by simply adding the browser download link.
    (chrome : a faster internet ) i think it will be helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Aiman

    Well when ou start running a web and checking your analytics, I am sure you will have a different thought. :)

    @Admin
    Alhamdulillah. Thanks for reminding I forgot to hide the stats. :p

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  6. thats good we should know about every user / visitor of our website , either he use google chrome , firefox , IE , safari , or opera
    MY BLOG

    ReplyDelete
  7. Internet Explorer Really Sucks .....
    Can't understand that a Brand Company like Microsoft makes such things .... Out of Mind ... Huhhh ....

    these summer vacations i started to make some money by making single page html website for small companies. All was going good but some projects were rejected and i return the money. I made their websites and when they checked on their offices they all were using IE and it did not worked. I had a great lose :(

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  8. @Shakil

    You are right pal and that is very true but not all visitors are tech savvy. There are a lot of people who are still exploring the latest browsers. Most don't even know what effect can a good browser give. That Microsoft utopia is still on many peoples mind. Therefore its important to educate them today.

    @Admin
    There is a wordpress plugin which automatically detects the browsers and alerts the user to upgrade. However we dont have php support on blogger. Adding a browser link can surely help but sometimes we do avoid adding every other link to keep a professional touch alive.


    @Faiz
    I do agree pal. This is the only way to better optimize the blog

    @Haider
    This is what I just told shakil. Offices and LEarning institutes are still IE users. Every singly design must be first checked in IE because it still remains the widely used browser. MOZILLA is often prefered by web masters but normal surfers would often use IE because big sites are well optimized in it.
    I am sorry for your loss pal. :p

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  9. Loosing 50% is quite substantial tell me what do i do/.


    sales letter

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  10. I just can't able to figure out what's wrong with my blog. Although my blog (www.techmeasy.blogspot.com) is running perfectly fine in Firefox, Opera and IE, its running frustratingly slow in Chrome. I tried debugging my blog by removing one widget at a time but couldn't able to figure out the root cause of this sluggishness in Chrome. Can you please guide me in this regard? Even suggestion of any kind would be helpful.

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  11. @Mustafa Bhai

    ahhhhhhhhh can't forget that loss :P

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  12. @jaylen
    Always check your website's performance in IE after every single template editing. Simple!


    @Agni
    Please remove all your sidebar widgets and check if the performance improves somehow. If it did then add a widget one at a time and check back. This way you will be able to spot the widget that is causing the load problem.
    However there could also be another reaosn:
    This could be as a result of Josh Peterson templates. Kindly read this: Should you use Template Designer layouts?


    @HAider
    I sympathize :p

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  13. Is there any way so that i can get to know that how my website SP LIBRARY will look on other browsers without having to install all of them.

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  14. Hi Mohammad,

    A friend of mine viewed our blog in IE8 and discovered that all he can see is one blog post, while all widgets are not visible. After being informed by this, I checked the blog in IE8 (for the first time) and saw the problem (only the last blog post visible, no widgets). After searching the internet, I landed in your website and I tried to apply your tips from “IE8 Website Operation Aborted Error Finally Solved!” but the blog still don’t work in IE8, please help, and many thanks in advance.
    this is the blog: http://moroccanbirds.blogspot.com/

    Regards,
    Mohamed

    ReplyDelete