Is your web site’s design driving customers away?
It’s bad to slide!
This will be a long ramble as I was eating my breakfast, mind idling away, and it centered on something I’d recently read:
“17% of visitors will leave a site if it has a slider”.
One poll, by GTMatrix, suggested that over 50% of visitors do NOT like sliders.
Some people like will sliders, but I can’t think of an example where someone would blog about ‘the top 25 slider sites’. Well, some do, but it’s the Internet, so… it’s to be expected, eh?
I searched for ‘wugahumphdamuph‘ and was mildly surprised not to get a result.
The Internet, being what it is, you expect a result no matter what you enter into Google. If you search for that, say, a month from now, now you will find it! (I wrote about this in relation to SEO and sharp practices, using somelonguselessname. You can follow the link and read the article, or just Google somelonguselessname).
Anyway, most experts will agree if you want conversions, if you want your visitors and customers to stay, do not use sliders.
It’s actually a psychological thing going back to the lizard part of our brain. Your brain expects a static scene; instead, it’s presented with something flipping away to the *left. To the primitive part of our brain, that flicker of motion registers danger.
*(I wonder if it would be worse for Westerners if the image flipped to the right or vertically!?)
There are several other reasons, especially going forward from 2022, like Google’s Core Vitals. Sliders are above the fold and load heavy, adding seconds to load times. People now want your page loaded in under 1 second on desktop and under 2 seconds on mobile. If your “Isn’t this great!!!” page takes upwards of 16 seconds to load, no one is looking at it!
SEO experts Yoast list several more reasons why sliders suck and should be banned from your website. For instance, only 1% of users will click on them, many associate them with unwanted advertising, and they can be problematic for mobile users (who now account for around 67% of web traffic).
404. Sliders not found?
Unlike ‘top slider pages’, there are loads of ‘top 404 pages’. If your 404 page is good enough, top sites will blog about you, and will send you traffic to find the page that isn’t there! (Or is it!?)
So, nobody really searches for “best slider pages” but “best 404 pages”, sure. The fact is most are boring, either untouched or offer a bland “go to the home page” or a search. The page not found for my main site, while not remarkable, does offers various solutions. The funniest I saw is probably a reflection of my dark humour. It went something like this:
“Page not found; it’s not us, it’s you. Learn to type!
OK, it might be us, but we’re blaming you anyway.
Go home!”
(Home being a link to home page.)
It’s ironic if you think about it; it’s like Schrodinger’s website: you don’t know if the 404 page is a live or a dead (link) until you look inside.
(Actually, you do, because there’s always a 404 page, but if are looking for ‘cat pictures’ and land on 404…, unless it was a cat site and 404 page was a cat gallery, totally plausible!) Yes, I know, I ramble; thus, I was reminded of the pope finding a black cat that wasn’t there!.
Are you not entertained?
The point is people want to be entertained, they want answers, and they want them NOW!
Sliders, then, are an unwelcome distraction.
Paradoxically, getting sidelined by fun facts can feed your procrastinations and tick the “Not a lot of people know that
” *box, so may be welcomed.
*Did you read that quote in Michael Caine’s voice?
He never came up with that!
The catchphrase “Not a lot of people know that” was an impersonation of Michael Caine made by Peter Sellers on the Parkinson show, back in 1972. Many years later (in 2002), again on the Parkinson show, Michael Caine explained how it came about. Back when answer machines were cutting edge tech, Peter Sellers, mimicking, had a recorded message saying, “My name is Michael Caine. I just want you to know Peter Sellers is not in. Not many people know that.”
The takeaway is clever 404 pages are good, while sliders are bad.
TO BE CONTINUED!
Feature image by Andreas Riedelmeier from Pixabay
The obvious analogy is that if your website is unwelcoming, you offer visitors only one option: leave as fast as possible!
