With an ever changing world around us, it’s sometimes hard to know when you should upgrade your Umbraco website.  We all know the most obvious reasons people, e.g. growth, budgeting etc..  so in today’s post, I’m going to list a few of the hopefully not so obvious points to consider if you’re thinking it’s time to upgrade.

Your website is not responsive

I’ve been building responsive sites for nearly 5 years now. Nowadays, people access websites from phones, tablets and PCs. So you need to make sure that your website works on all of them, otherwise, you’ll lose visitors and potential customers. To throw fuel on the fire, Google will also penalise your website if it’s not responsive, so fewer people will find your website through organic searches in Google.  If you don’t know if your website is responsive, I suggest you try using this tool to find out. If your website isn’t responsive, you definitely need to upgrade NOW.

High Bounce Rate

A high-bounce rate is when someone visits your website and then immediately leaves.  We do this all the time, you want to find something on Google, you go to a page and it’s not very useful, so we hit the back button and carry on with our search.  In Google’s thinking, if you’ve got a high bounce rate, it means that your content is badly written, or your pages aren’t laid out very well, your graphics are out-dated etc.  If you have a high bounce rate then you should definitely consider upgrading.

Using an Old CMS Version

Umbraco is on version 8 and over the years, a number of performance and security issues have been fixed.  If you’re running Umbraco 4* you should consider upgrading.

Branding Change

A website is your company’s online presence.  Your branding, messaging needs to be consistent.  If you’re planning on redesign then you should also consider upgrading Umbraco at the same time.

Speed

If your web page takes too long to load, then you’ll have a high bounce rate and people won’t want to use your site. A study was done and the page speed load can directly collaborate to bounce rate and lost sales.  If your web page loads really slowly, you may be able to add a few elastic band type solutions to patch it up; on a lot of projects I’ve worked on though, the quickest and cheapest option has been to rebuild.

Site Crashes 

If your website crashes at random times for unknown reasons, another option is to upgrade.  In each release, the Umbraco team improves the product.  If your site crashes and you’re running an older version of the CMS, an upgrade might magically fix your situation.

It s Old

We can probably all relate to this point, you go out, buy some new trainers and think they’re the coolest thing in the world.  Now fast forward a few years and you probably don’t feel the same love for them now that they’ve seen better days.  If your website looks ‘old’ people won’t use it.

You can tell that your site is old, if you’re too embarrassed to send people to your website, or you apologise to people for how bad it looks.  You should be proud of your Umbraco website and if you’re not, then it’s time to upgrade!