Adobe ends support in December 2020 and browsers have been disabling it for years. Anything on your site built in Flash needs replacing this year, and the common cases are old animations, menus, and embedded video players.

What is actually happening

Adobe announced some time ago that it would stop supporting Flash Player at the end of 2020. That date is now this year.

Browsers have been ahead of it. Most have required a click to enable Flash for a while, several block it by default, and after December they will remove the capability entirely.

The practical effect is not a warning message. It is that the content simply does not appear. A visitor sees an empty rectangle where something used to be.

Nobody will tell you when it happens. It will already have happened for a share of your visitors.

Why this affects more small businesses than expected

Flash was the default for anything moving on a web page for roughly a decade. If your site was built or last redesigned before about 2013, there is a reasonable chance something in it uses Flash.

The usual suspects are not obvious from looking at the page.

The second and third are the ones that catch small businesses, because a broken menu means a site nobody can navigate.

How to find out in ten minutes

  1. Open your site in a current browser and look for empty boxes or missing sections.
  2. Check the header and any gallery specifically, since those are the common cases.
  3. Try the menu on a phone, which never supported Flash at all.
  4. Ask whoever built it whether any Flash was used.
  5. Look at the page source for references to swf files, which is the Flash file format.

The third is the fastest useful test. Phones have never run Flash, so anything that works on your desktop and is missing on a phone is a strong candidate.

If your site already looks broken on a phone, this may be why, and it has been costing you visitors for years rather than starting in December.

What replaces it

Everything Flash did has a modern equivalent, and in most cases the replacement is simpler.

Animation and interaction are now handled directly by the browser, without a plugin. Galleries and sliders are ordinary components. Video plays natively in formats every browser supports.

Which means this is rarely a rebuild. It is usually replacing one component with a current equivalent.

The exception is anything genuinely interactive, such as a configurator or a calculator, which may need rebuilding properly. Those are worth costing separately.

A worked example

A flooring supplier whose site had a rotating gallery of installations across the top of the homepage.

On a desktop it worked, because the owner had enabled Flash years ago and never thought about it again. On every phone, and on any computer where somebody had not enabled it, the top third of the homepage was blank.

He had been looking at a working site for four years while a growing share of visitors saw an empty box above the fold.

The fix was replacing the gallery with a standard image slider, which took a couple of hours and used the same photographs. Nothing else on the site changed.

The instructive part is not the fix. It is that nothing announced the problem. He found it because somebody mentioned the site looked odd on their phone.

What it does to being found

A consequence people miss, because it is not visible on the page.

Content inside a Flash component was never readable by search engines. Text in an animated header, a product list in a configurator, captions in a gallery: none of it was ever indexed.

So a business whose homepage headline lived inside a Flash element has, for years, had a homepage that search engines saw as largely empty.

Which means replacing it is not only fixing a broken box. It frequently puts text in front of a search engine for the first time, and that is worth doing deliberately rather than as a side effect.

Write the replacement content as content, in other words, rather than recreating an animation with the same words hidden inside it.

Doing it before December

The argument for not waiting.

The content is already invisible to a substantial share of visitors, so the loss is happening now rather than starting at the deadline.

And whoever fixes it will be busier in the autumn, when everybody else notices. A component replaced in February is a small job. The same job in November competes with everybody else's.

There is also a decent chance that a site old enough to contain Flash has other problems worth looking at, and this is a reasonable prompt to check.

If the site is old enough to have Flash

Worth asking a wider question while you are in there.

A site built before 2013 predates the shift to phones. It may not resize, the text may be small, the buttons may be hard to tap, and it may load slowly on mobile data.

None of that has a deadline attached, which is why it never gets addressed. The Flash deadline is a useful excuse to look at the rest.

The decision then is whether to patch the Flash component and leave everything else, or treat this as the moment to rebuild. Both are defensible, and the answer depends on how much the current site is producing.

What to ask whoever maintains it

Four questions, and the answers should be quick.

Does any part of the site use Flash. What breaks in December if we do nothing. What would replacing those parts cost. And is there anything else on this site that has already stopped working without anybody noticing.

The fourth is the one that produces the most useful answer, because Flash is rarely the only thing on an old site that has quietly failed. Expect the honest reply to include at least one thing you did not know about.

The wider question of whether an ageing site is worth repairing or replacing is the same calculation as in deciding whether to build a site at all.

Frequently asked questions

What is happening with Flash?

Adobe ends support in December 2020. Browsers have been disabling it for years, and after the deadline the content simply does not appear.

Why does this affect small businesses?

Flash was the default for anything animated for about a decade. Sites built or redesigned before 2013 often use it for galleries, menus or video.

How do I check my own site?

Open it on a phone. Phones never ran Flash, so anything present on desktop and missing on mobile is a strong candidate. Then look for swf files in the source.

Is this a full rebuild?

Rarely. Most Flash components have a direct modern equivalent and can be swapped in hours. Genuinely interactive tools may need rebuilding properly.

Why not wait until December?

The content is already invisible to many visitors, so the loss is happening now. And whoever fixes it will be far busier in the autumn.

What should I ask my web person?

Whether any Flash is used, what breaks if nothing is done, what replacement costs, and whether anything else has already stopped working unnoticed.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Site built before 2013?

We will tell you what has already stopped working, which is usually more than Flash.

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