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I'm a webdesigner and also have an etsy site. I want to make myself a website to make sales independently of etsy as well, and also to build my online presence for my store. I am debating between 2 wordpress themes I REALLY want one that supports all browsers, and internet explorer as low as IE9, and the other one I don't want as much but it supports all browsers and internet explorer down to IE8...

Question

How important is it to support IE8 for my site? My target audience are women in their 20s and 30s who are getting married... 2nd target audience is all women ages 20-60 who like rustic home decor.

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  • Generally speaking, you want the most compatibility. However, your question is too vague to answer. Oct 5, 2015 at 19:15
  • IE Browser Stats IMPORTANT NOTE: this is only for visitors to their site which are primarily on the techie side so the numbers are biased. But, I think you can still derive that the percentage is rather small. If you think the theme will provide a better user experience over all at the cost of losing IE8 then I'd say it's worth it but that is an opinion.
    – DasBeasto
    Oct 5, 2015 at 20:04
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    Also interesting note, Bootstrap is no longer supporting IE8 with its newest version and they have millions of sites using their framework. I would think that shows IE8 is on its way out.
    – DasBeasto
    Oct 5, 2015 at 20:08
  • IE is dying too... They are replacing it with, what it called? Edge?
    – UXerUIer
    Oct 22, 2015 at 15:06

2 Answers 2

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You can check share of each browser version to decide if you should support old versions of IE or not. According to most recent data published on http://www.w3schools.com/, in August 2015 less than 0.7% of users had IE8. If your website has low traffic then support of old browsers may be not cost efficient.

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  • Most recent data from where? Can you provide the source?
    – nightning
    Oct 5, 2015 at 22:29
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    @nightning, thank you for your comment. I added source to the answer. Oct 7, 2015 at 14:43
  • The w3schools source is not a good one since it only measures the users who visit that site who are most likely web developers and their want to bes. A far better list to look at is here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
    – Rob
    Oct 22, 2015 at 12:00
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Your website is probably tagged with a web analytics tool. I use Google Analytics, but most of them provide information about browsers used by your userbase. You should consider how many still use IE8 and how much revenue does IE8 provide.

Browser information

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