Building impressive and user-friendly websites – that’s what web designers do.
These creative and talented professionals use a wide variety of design tools to plan, create, and maintain a website. Web designers make sure to add elements that convey a brand message effectively, and using sliders is one such method.
Or is it?
Well, if you aren’t sure if website sliders are effective, this post is meant for you. Read on and learn whether or not your website should have sliders.
However, before we begin, let’s get to the basics.
What Are Sliders?
Website sliders are slideshows or carousels with stunning imagery conjoined with high-quality, action-inspiring text materials and CTAs. These are ideal to bag attention for your top-service offerings, products, or portfolio. These are mostly used by businesses to show relevant content and draw the attention of their visitors in the first place.
While several market leaders Microsoft, Squarespace, SpaceX, and Spotify feature sliders, there are many who don’t favor the whole idea of using these slideshows. They call adding sliders as ‘conversion and SEO killers.’
Sliders – Should You Say Yes or No?
If you’ll try to dig a little deeper, you’ll realise that using sliders is a hot topic of debate in the web designer community. Some designers consider sliders useful, others go vehemently against it. Let’s see the reasons for their denial
– It is believed that website sliders distract users from the critical elements of the website. Since sliders present with so many options at once, it can get a little confusing for the users to focus on their main job.
– Some users find sliders similar to ads and choose to skip them as well as website due to unnecessary data consumption.
– Any high multimedia content is shown to impact on the loading time of the pages. Sliders, being high in multimedia content impact directly on the loading time which affects the SEO as well as conversion rates.
– The space taken up by sliders also affects greatly on the other content of the website. It also gives the impression that the company wasn’t sure to highlight key features. Hence, chose to showcase everything available at their disposal.
– Some users believe sliders are similar to the auto-playing video content which they choose to ignore.
On the other hand, another section of the web development cohort chooses to include sliders on their website. They find sliders a great way to keep users engaged on the website. While texts can sometimes get boring, sliders help in attracting users and keeping them stuck for a long time. It also enhances the user experience and plays a great role in building desired traffic on the website platform.
So it all boils down to the fact that sliders are not right for every website – there are some they enhance, and some they can bring down. If sliders solidify the brand and enhance the user’s trust, they can be a critical part of UX. If they distract users and creates confusion, they will hurt your conversions.
How Can You Use Sliders?
As each organisation is unique, so are their customer preferences.
To use or not to use sliders depends on your website design and usage. Start by analysing what your users are looking for and how your sliders can help them achieve their goals. In case you opt to use these, make sure to create stunning sliders and minimise distraction by adding only relevant content. Focus on what your customers are expecting and create sliders accordingly.
At Netplanet Digital, our team of experts can assess your business needs and discuss if your website should go with website sliders. We’ll consider multiple aspects like user personas and your business goals to design a top-notch web asset. To get further details, get in touch with us – schedule a 30-minute free call with our experts today!
