The answer is no. You may stop reading now if you want.
Answering the big questions in website design.
Sliders are rotating banners, usually, on home pages, like the one on our home page.
This also may be a little more “inside baseball” on website design than most people want to know, but here it goes. Chances are good you, like me, do like sliders.
The truth is I love sliders. I love making sliders.
I have a wonderful slider plugin for WordPress websites that lets me do all sorts of fun things. I can make text and images fade in, fade out, roll, waggle, slip and slide right, left, up and down and do just about anything I can dream up. I can add buttons to click to another page, like the form to set up an appointment, buy something or sign up for emails. I can add video from YouTube or Vimeo and show the latest posts and pages, all to get your customers’ attention.
Sliders are fun to make. Sliders are fun to show a client. They like them. I like them. They are popular now. Full width sliders, the kind on our pages, is a popular trend in website design. The style is everywhere.
Maybe they are the bright, shiny objects of the internet (which is really the whole point of them, to get your attention), but the evidence is that they are not doing your site any good. They actually maybe hurting it.
Science rears its ugly.
I first read of trouble in slider land in an article by Erik Runyon several years ago. He developed websites for Notre Dame and found most readers just clicked on the first slider they saw. The readers seemed not to be too interested in watching the rest of show. Over 84% of those clicking clicked on the link in the first slider. Five sliders and number one always got the majority of clicks. One and done, so to speak. A waste of content.
These slides are still fine.
This affects conversions. If you use your site to sell things or get leads, that’s bad.
I should also note slider detractors complained sliders slowed page-load times and often forced the important content bits down the page, below the fold, two things not good for search engine optimization (SEO) and currying favor with Google. That’s also bad.
Still I pressed on using sliders. Hey, the clients liked them. Give them what they like, right? What’s wrong with that?
Sliders suck.
Then I read that line early last year on a blog I frequent: “Let me make one thing very clear: sliders suck.” This from a firm that makes its living knowing, understanding and consulting on SEO.
They presented all sorts of evidence, factual data driven evidence and analysis from experts, that sliders are a bad idea. They do affect SEO, load-times and conversions for the worse. The experts stated aesthetic reasons and sound marketing reasons why sliders are bad. They won the argument. Hard to argue against that kinda of intellectual firepower.
Sigh. So, I am going tone down my use of sliders. I am going to advise prudence to clients. And tone down the special effects. Serious and simple. Promise.
From where this all started, this is what Notre Dame now uses.
I can live with it.