If your customers are updating their websites, now might be the time to lose something which is hampering their conversion rates and SEO: homepage sliders.
There’s enough data now to convince anyone that sliders – or carousels – are at best ignored by page viewers. At worst, they put people off clicking through, confuse them, and seem like adverts when they aren’t.
SEO issues they can cause include the continued use of Flash, despite all the evidence against it; a slower page loading speed because of the high-resolution images they use, resulting in penalties by search engines; and the use of multiple h1 tags for the moving images.
Keyword effectiveness is undermined, and the content of the page is seen as more shallow by search engines like Google.
For the past few years, designers have been advising against sliders because of this, and because of the fact they take up a large part of a homepage without doing enough to encourage good click-through rates.
Sliders over-dominate a homepage. Other important content underneath them tends to get lost, and users often cannot wait to navigate away from the page to something more user-friendly.
Time, then, for your customers’ old sliders to be consigned to the digital scrapheap.
So what can they do instead?
The simple answer is you’re the key – you can marry compelling content and attractive images to work together and communicate your customers’ messages.
If they want click-throughs, they need to have copy on their websites which converts. It has to identify and solve their ideal customers’ problems, and deliver a clear, strong call to action which can be understood by everyone who visits the page. The better the quality of the content, the more compelling their homepages will be.
Use data from Google Analytics to build up a picture of the website’s ideal customers and what they want to see on the site. Look at marketing data for the demographics involved and build up a detailed picture of the customers before you draw up your copy or commission images.
If your customer is wavering, take them through data about sliders. You need to show them that when it comes to sliders, less is definitely more.