On one of my sites, over 40% of visitors use IE6. What to do?

Question

Design

Hello!
I no longer upset myself with the need to make up / check sites in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, but with surprise and horror I find in the Awstats statistics summaries for my sites a significant percentage of users of these browsers. For example:

Browser	Hits	Percent
MSIE	1.067	25.3%
— Msie 9.0	276	6.5%
— Msie 8.0	344	8.1%
— Msie 7.0	204	4.8%
— Msie 6.0	232	5.5%

But these are flowers, the site is designed for a young audience.
Here is another example:

Browser	Hits	Percent
MSIE	237	61.8%
— Msie 9.0	ten	2.6%
— Msie 8.0	one	0.2%
— Msie 7.0	22	5.7%
— Msie 6.0	181	47.2%
— Msie 5.5	fifteen	3.9%

And this is January 2013 (!) of the year.

Naturally, my sites look and work (if they work) in IE6 very badly. I amuse myself with the fact that not the most advanced users have all the sites look bad. But these are potential clients…

The businessman and the webmaster in me cannot agree.

Question to the community: are you still optimizing for IE6?

Answer 1

We don't optimize for IE6 for a long time and often even for IE7, but sometimes, as in your case, there may be a real need to do so. Of course, these are your sites, and no one is forcing you to make Pixel Perfect. Make a reasonable degradation for this junk, so that the content does not fly apart there and replace any transparency and shadows with uniform backgrounds and borders and this will be enough.

Answer 2

bots:? look at the real user agent and the behavior of these users on the site.

Answer 3

Now the development of devices and technologies is going so that there are usually more users who access the site through mobile platforms (tablets, Android, iOS, etc.) than users with very outdated browsers (IE 6-7). So it is much more reasonable to spend time optimizing for mobile platforms than for very outdated browsers.

Answer 4

Hang a stub ( such , for example). Let them update or use a normal browser, or go through the forest. All the same, ie6 users will not buy anything and will not bring any benefits. Most likely, these are bots, as already mentioned above.

Answer 5

How come such a high percentage of IE6 users?
- The main users of the resource are people who enter through the corporate (educational) network, where there are machines with Windows XP without updates.
— Bots.
What to do?
- Use css3pie or something similar.

Answer 6

No. Not optimized for IE6. Moreover, now all orders contain "HTML5" and a complete rejection of all IE up to nine (and in one it was even "it is desirable that it works in IE9, if there is time for this". This is happiness.
But I will make a reservation that this is a social and entertainment sector For the business sector, things may be very different.

Answer 7

It really depends on the theme of the site. If this is some kind of B2B, then it should not be ignored. If you post jokes and warez links and turn off ads, then forget it, it's not worth the effort.
How clearly do you imagine the portrait of your user? Perhaps something was not taken into account?

Answer 8

Track the sources these users come from. Perhaps this is some kind of shit traffic pouring from affiliate programs "visit the site and earn 2 kopecks."