Adobe will remove the Adobe Flash Player from its website after December 2020. This means that we are essentially seeing the EOL End of Life of the Flash Player. If your website was originally build in Flash and it requires the Flash Player in order to view it, then it’s time to think about redesigning your website.
I recall back in the early 2000s having to deal with Adobe Flash websites, websites that were built in Adobe Flash. While these websites looked good, there were all sorts of SEO-related problems with them. The main problem was that the content was not indexable by the search engines. The search engines essentially saw them as one-page websites with no content. So, whenever I saw a Flash website, the answer was immediately “redesign your website”.
I took a quick look at the search engine results in Google and it turns out that there are still a lot of websites that require Adobe Flash. See these search results here and you’ll see many that require the Adobe Flash plugin in order to view.
On Adobe’s site, they announced the Adobe Flash Player end of life. They originally announced the end of Flash Player in 2017, but added this: “As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020 (“EOL Date”). We made this announcement in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft?and?Mozilla – which issued complementary announcements with more technical detail on what the Flash Player EOL will mean for developers, enterprises, and consumers using their specific OS environments or browsers.?”
It’s important to note that you should only download the Flash Player from the Adobe website, even though it’s made available at other websites. The other websites typically include malware and viruses in their downloads.
As I mentioned previously, if your website is still in Flash or any part of it requires the Adobe Flash Player, it’s time to move on and consider a more up-to-date technology before December 2020.
It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with this page:
https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
Currently there are 45 million links from 46,000 domain names that apparently still have the Adobe Flash Player link, so they are still linking to that page. Take a look at the Majestic.com data:
That’s an indication that there are still 46,000 domain names still using the Adobe Flash Player. That’s a small number of websites compared to the number that used to use the Flash Player. There used to be as many as 705 million web pages across 751,000 domain names. For an enterprising web designer, that might actually be an interesting list to go through: it might be a great way to find web design leads, telling them they need to redesign their website before Adobe Flash Player isn’t available anymore.