Breaking Up with Your Home Page Slider

<p>The homepage slider. They’re sometimes called “carousels” or “slide shows“. They once ruled the web because people were captivated by something moving on the page. Over time though, and especially in recent years, they’ve become a disappointing user experience.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Here are 5 reasons why you end the relationship with your huge homepage slider.</strong></p> <p><strong>1. Sliders Contribute to Lost Traffic: </strong>Sliders slow download times because they often use multiple large images, which quickly eat up bandwidth.</p> <p>Websites lose traffic when it takes a significant amount of time to load content. That few milliseconds of slowness in loading several large images have been proven to contribute to a higher bounce rate. “Bounce rate” is the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking any action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or making a purchase.</p> <p><strong>2. Sliders can become invisible to your visitors. </strong>Banner blindness is when people subconsciously ignore content that resembles an advertisement.</p> <p>When users visit a website, they have a particular objective in mind (like reading more about a news story they heard on the radio or registering for a contest) and anything resembling an advertisement gets passed over – both visually and perceptually.</p> <p><strong>3. Sliders have horrible click rates: </strong>Visitors simply do not get clicked. This means they are not effective in moving visitors around your website and getting visitors to do what you want them to. &nbsp;A study by<br> The University of Notre Dame<br> showed a click-through rate of barely 1% on sliders. 84% of those clicks were on the first item in the rotation.</p> <p><strong>4. Sliders can harm your SEO efforts:</strong> Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing website traffic and exposure to your brand through proper search engine results. Contributing factors include:</p> <p>- Slow site speeds because of multiple large image downloads. Slow-load