blog > there's no excuse to use a carousel any more
There's no excuse to use a carousel any more
13th of February 2019
In all but the smallest organisations multiple individuals and departments want to be represented on the website's home-page.The organisation may offer multiple services or products, there may be upcoming events, or perhaps someone senior has decreed that their latest pensées must be feautred on the home-page.
For this reason, websites often use carousels to shoe-horn content from multiple sources into the prominent "above the fold" section of the homepage.
However, studies have shown that 89% of clicks to a slider are on the first slide and only a vanishingly small number make it to slides beyond the second one.
Sliders also unsettle your website's visitors. Just as the first slide is viewed and its message understood, it disappears and another one replaces it. This is one is then also whisked out of view, just as it is digested, and so on. If anything is going to contribute to a higher bounce rate and lower conversions, it's the anxiety casued by this ever-shifting landscape where nothing stays still long enough to be understood.
Readers of this blog will by now be familiar with my view that a) every part of a website should contribue to a purpose and that b) success or failure to acieve that purpose should be numerically measurable.
The purpose of your website's home-page is to grab people and lead them along the pathway towards conversion, whatever form that conversion takes (purchase, contact, registration etc.). Some visitors may want to take the plunge immediately, some may require further cajoling, others may want to bookmark and come back later – all these routes should be facilitated, but nothing should allow people to deviate too far from the path.
The top section of the home-page of your website is the most important part of the site. It should contain your boldest and most carefully-considered message, explaining your value proposition and calling the visitor to action. It should not unsettle and confuse visitors with a distracting and eclectic pastiche of links to obscure parts of the website.