Sliders. Slideshows. Carousels.
Whatever you call them, they suck.
I know, I’ve lost half of you already. Get a shiny new website template, or dig into a popular toolkit and they’ll be there. Among new site owners, it’s practically expected. They’ve seen them, liked them and always wanted one of their own.
But the grim reality is that they often hurt far more than they can help.
And that’s why this article exists. To try and break down all the problems so that, if nothing else, you’re at least aware of why it’s probably a bad decision.
Performance & Traffic
The first and often biggest problem with an image carousel is the size.
The more things you put on your site, and the bigger they are, the slower it’s going to load for your users. There are other variable in play, but that’s basically the long and short of it.
When you put in just a single image carousel, you are typically pushing:
- Third-party Javascript & CSS
- Supplemental Javascript tools (usually jQuery)
- Custom Javascript & CSS
- Numerous large images
Purely from a performance perspective, this one single element requires a lot to get going.
And even if everything is optimized and minimal, the bigger problem isn’t the carousel itself.
It’s that last point, the images, that really drags things down.
Media- images, videos, audio- are almost universally the biggest resources on any website by far. And large images, particularly those of the giant, full-screen variety, are among the worst offenders. And with a slider, you’re probably loading up three or more.
An image carousel is a lead weight that can easily drag your site’s load time past 3 seconds, which is about the time many visitors give up and go elsewhere.
The Worst Possible Place
Now, all of that should be bad enough, but ask yourself this question: what page is it on?
Chances are, your answer is “The home page.”
Understandable. Traditionally, that’s been the place people are most likely to land, and you want to put your best foot forward, showing off everything you’ve got. And from a sales standpoint, that might make sense.
But from a technical standpoint, this presents many problems.
- New visitors already get your slowest load times. Assuming your site is properly configured, most of the resources you send to your visitors will be stored on their devices so they can be reused, saving them download times. But, obviously, this can only apply after they’ve already downloaded them at least once. So, a heavy home page can end up being a double-whammy.
- Your first impression may end up being a blank space. Whatever image you’ve got lined up first on your slider, by the time everything’s done rendering, your visitor may already have moved on. Few messages are less effective than ones not delivered.
- When a site takes too long to load, visitors click away. This can be a difficult problem to deal with all on its own. So, adding a slider to the mix just means, right up front, you’re setting yourself up for the best chances of losing new customers before they’ve even seen what you have to offer.
The Reusability Problem: Stopping at Just One
Alright, so putting a slider on the home page, clearly bad.
But what if you just use one, and stop there?
Well, this may seem counter-intuitive, but that actually kind of makes it worse.
See, once you’ve gone to the trouble of loading up the scripts onto your users’ devices, they’re generally “cached,” meaning they can be used over and over again without having to re-download them.
So, since you’ve already got the code loaded in there, taking up space, might as well use it. Otherwise, the only place it’s serving a purpose is in the worst possible place.
Put another way: if your site can actually be improved by using multiple sliders, it becomes easier to justify the investment.
Okay, but what if I don’t care about your technobabble “problems”?
Well, rather snippy, aren’t we? But fair enough, what of the “other problems?”
UX: User Experience Testing
Beyond the issues with performance, there’s the business problems.
If you’re trying to increase sales (and who isn’t), then you either are, or should be using some manner of data-tracking/analytics to measure traffic, click-through rates, bounce rates and so forth.
And it’s at that point that you may discover that sliders add a level of complexity. See, when you’re trying to test the effectiveness/attractiveness of a call-to-action (CTA), it helps if you can be relatively certain your visitors are actually seeing it.
If your slider is set to automatically rotate images, there’s a chance they’ll miss/not stick around for some of them. To say nothing of the question of how users might be affected by the speed, quantity and combinations of CTAs you might be offering. Variables abound.
“Okay, I’ll set it to manual and remove all those variables. What about that, smart guy?”
Well, then the question becomes, why not just use a static image, cut your load time and increase your rendering speed?
Chances are most people won’t click beyond the first CTA anyway, and if you really want to find out, you’ll have to use more complex tracking code.
The Purpose Problem
And finally, there is the last, most fundamental issue that comes across far, far, far too often.
Many larger sliders go one step beyond the sins of performance and testing, and commit the gravest sin of purposelessness. They display the images inside them and nothing else.
Consequently, the real-world effect is usually that they often take up valuable marketing real estate that could have been used to sell the benefits of the business/organization/etc.
The point many people never quite got was that the original intent of large or full-page-image splash-screens was to focus to the users’ attention on one particular product, sale, cause, promotion or whatever have you. And along with this, typically you would include some text and/or buttons. (The aforementioned “calls to action” or CTAs.)
And once this concept is understood, we are able to step out of the mindset of sliders as artsy toys, and seeing them for their usefulness as tools.
And at that point, we loop back to the UX issues and we see that, as a business tool, it just isn’t very efficient or effective. In fact, the only business I know of that can get away with using them is Amazon, purely by virtue of being Amazon.
