With an ever-changing world around us, it's sometimes hard to know when you should upgrade your Umbraco website. 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 since 2010. Nowadays, people access websites from phones, tablets and PCs. 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 Google considers your website I suggest you try using this tool to find out. If your website isn’t responsive, you definitely need to upgrade the CSS part of your website NOW.

High Bounce Rate

A bounce rate is determined by the time someone first visits your website to the time they leave. Everyone does 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. If you have a high bounce rate then you should definitely consider upgrading and rewriting your content and change your marketing message.

Your site is running an old version of Umbraco

Umbraco is on version 8. As time progresses, new and updated versions of the software come out. Performance, security and new features are constantly being released. If you're running anything under V8 you should consider upgrading.

Branding Change

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

Speed & Headless

If your web page takes too long to load, you'll have a high bounce rate and people won't want to use your site. Many UX studies have been done in this area and it has been proven that your 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 many of the projects that I have 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.

You want to be cool 😎😎😎

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. You probably don't feel the same love for them now that they've seen better days. If you have time and want to keep up to date for bragging rights then be cool 😎

If you are too embarrassed to tell people you know about your website, or you find yourself apologizing to people for how bad it looks, it's time to freshen it up. You should be proud of your Umbraco website and if you're not, then it's time to upgrade! Happy Coding 🤘