Are sliders destroying your website conversion rate?

I want to talk about conversion rate optimisation, specifically this week about sliders. There’s a debate about whether or not they do your site any good, and I’m in a large group of SEO professionals that advise you to never use them on your website.

Basically, sliders suck! The first slide gets all the clicks, the second one a fraction of the first and the rest are usually left alone.

The biggest problem with sliders is that the odds are good that you’ll be presenting information on your most valuable real estate that doesn’t interest most of the people who’ve clicked on your site. If you’ve got an e-commerce site with a five-panel slider, your readers will click on uninteresting content four out of five times. The slider keeps changing, giving them even more content they don’t need. If you want those clicks, you need to focus your most valuable real estate on your most enticing content.

Another problem with sliders, or carousels as they’re sometimes called, is that they slow down your website to a large degree. We already know that up to 40% of all readers will click away from your site if it doesn’t load within three seconds. Can you afford to add something to your site that slows it down even more? We already know that having a slider on top of your page will hurt your ranking in Google, causing readers to click away will lower your rank even more.

For bloggers, sliders present a different problem. Your readers are there to read your content, not see a variety of images. They don’t want to have to scroll down and search for your posts, they want it at the very top of the page. 

If you’ve found different results with sliders and you’ve found a reason to like them, I’d love to know what you think.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.

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