Should you use a slider or carousel on your website?
Very simple website with both a title and URL that answers itself: Should I Use A Carousel?
Slideshow widgets were an instant hit on websites when they came out years ago. They were fun, they moved, and especially they were new! And so people landing on a site would watch them.
Now? Not so much. According to usability researcher Eric Runyon says that sliders might really slow down your site and consume a lot of your visitor’s mobile bandwidth but less than 2% are ever clicked on. And 89% of those clicks are the first slide.
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Homepage visits: 3,755,297
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Percentage that clicked a feature: 1.07%
Source: Eric Runyon
To be honest there are places where a slideshow can come in handy. But you want to put them in context and you really want to have a reason. A quickie demo slideshow on an inside “how to” page? Where the thing to be demonstrated is actually to simple to make a video for? Sure. A quick demo of several uses or applications of a product on a page that goes into more detail? That could be good too.
Point being that the answer isn’t always no. It’s just usually no.
(Crystal ball prediction: those full-size homepage “hero” images were cool too. And maybe they still are. But I predict users will start scrolling past them almost as fast as they’re scrolling past sliders and carousels now.)
“Abandoned Carousel” photo by Flickr contributor Jason Rogers.