Why 3.x forums have 5 times more visitors

[Princeton]

We just recently upgraded our big Board site to vb4.

We do not have a typical vBulletin site. The site is heavily modified. We only utilize the forum part of the vBulletin suite.

We are still making some adjustments ... tweaking to make pages faster ... cleaning up code ... tweaking for browser compatibility ... etc

With the upgrade, I also made some changes to our navigation architecture (modified a few, moved a few, etc). The URL restructuring was needed to improve user experience and ROI. I do believe we will bounce back stronger than ever. The next 2-6 months will show this to be true.

Note: We already surpassed same time last year traffic but we are aiming for bigger growth.

Why I decided to upgrade?

1. CSS Table-Less layout - this alone can increase speed of site (or at least the perception of speed) ... bandwidth and page loading improved by 60% vs previous Table layout
2. It was time. Every 2-3 years the site is due for a major upgrade. Most members now accept this as the norm. Negative feedback was good and for the most part it was due to real bugs.