Can you believe it? One of the most popular features on
every website is also one the most detrimental to those businesses.
This feature is found on thousands— hundreds of thousands of web sites.
Yet, it's killing conversions every day. What am I talking about?
Some people call them sliders, some people call them carousels—
slideshows, rotating banners. It's the images
at the top of the page that slide by.
And people love the, but it's killing your conversions.
They can even hurt your search rank. A 2013 study by Notre Dame University showed
the only one percent of customers were clicking
on slides to go to a destination or take an action.
And out of that 1 percent, eighty-four percent
of them were clicking on the very first slide. Any subsequent slides
that were shown, had an increasingly bad
click-through rate. The more slides, the lower your click-through rate.
And this makes sense. Because think about it—
when customers come to your site, they're not waiting around,
watching the slideshow. They're looking for information.
You're not going to sit there for twenty or thirty seconds. Long time web
usability
expert Jacob Nielson did a study
in the United Kingdom, showing that users did not retain
information that was contained in big bold letters
on first slide of a carousel,
because the banners are going by
too fast. They could not read and retain
the information. Also most carousels are at the top of
the homepage of a website. But every slide contains a large
image which needs to be downloaded by the browser,
causing the page weight to get bulkier and bulkier—
meaning that page speed is slower and slower.
Google dislikes this. Search engines use
speed of page download on mobile and desktop
as a ranking criteria of your website.
Many carousels aren't even touch-enabled
on mobile. They're not mobile friendly to the
point where you can touch them with your finger and move them along. But if
carousels are bad and people don't click through to anything,
why do we keep using them? Well there's a couple reasons for this.
One: Both web designers and business owners
like carousels because they move. they're fancy, they're cool looking.
In large organizations, it's a way
not have to make choices about what is the most important thing
to show on the homepage. If there's a large organization and they have several
departments,
each department can have a slide. But every slide past the first one
is not going to get clicked on probably, or even looked at!
But it makes these departments within an organization
feel better. For midsized and smaller businesses, a lot of them use WordPress themes
that
are found on a market place like ThemeForest. And most of these themes
have a home page slider or two
built in. But the theme designers
in these marketplaces are not thinking about the agencies
they are selling to, the end users, or the businesses that are going to be using
these themes. They are thinking about "What features can we add
that will make this theme sell?"
This isn't to say that all carousels are bad or we should never use them,
but just understand the limitations. A lot of people
ignore these large sliders anyway, because of an effect
called "banner blindness". Now in the late 1990s, when the web was new,
banner advertising worked for a very short time. But after that,
people learned to tune those out.
They learned to tune out the banners, the ads, all the stuff—
all the extraneous bullshit. They learned to ignore it.
Hundreds of heat map and eye-tracking studies
have shown that consumers tend to ignore
these carousels and rotating sliders,
because they perceive it as an ad.
They perceive it as something that's not important—
it's not the information that they came to the page for.
This isn't to say that all carousels are bad, but we have to realize
the limitations of them and act accordingly.
Instead of putting a carousel on the homepage,
choose one main message for your home page
and put it up top. Use carousels
on your inner pages. Say if you're selling products online
put an array of product images on
inner pages so people can manually scroll through,
and find what they want. Give your users the control
to start and stop where they want to. Don't make the information
fly by before they can even retain it—not have it whiz by like a bullet train.
It's important to make carousels the
end goal and not the gateway
to the goal. Don't put three different slides with three different
calls-to-action on them, because it's likely that your users are going to click
none of them. Don't embed contact forms,
don't embed "Shop Now" buttons on your slides,
because the likelihood that people are going to click them is very low.
Always make sure that if you're using a slider, that
it's mobile friendly and is touch enabled. Remember in 2015,
more people are accessing the internet on a mobile device
then they are on a desktop or laptop computer.
Now if you like what you've seen here today,
do me a huge favor and hit the Subscribe button.
That will ensure that you'll never miss another one of these insightful videos
ever again. My name is John Locke.
My website is LockedownDesign.com,
and I will be here building a business, one person at a time.
And building a community, one relationship at the time.
Thank you so much for watching and
Peace. John Locke is a web developer and consultant based in Sacramento California.
You can find him online at LockedownDesign dot com.