What goes around comes around: Why the homepage carousel needs to stay dead
What goes around comes around: Why the homepage carousel needs to stay dead

By on in Content, Design & Experience

What goes around comes around: Why the homepage carousel needs to stay dead

Just when we think the world has moved beyond homepage slideshows, carousels, sliders, whatever name you prefer, we have to knock them back again like an unending game of whack-a-mole.

We get it. You want to reach multiple audiences or promote multiple products and you’re worried that people will leave if they don’t see the thing they need upon arriving at your home page. And, because people like telling clients what they want to hear, you can still find advice about carousel best practices and examples of sites that used them well published monthly. But they tend to focus on aesthetics and never tell you whether they worked.


It may be internally unpopular for you to say no to every department wanting a presence on the home page, but it’s not about the company. It’s about the user.

Why? Because they probably didn’t. Unfortunately, carousels have proven time and time again that they actually do the opposite of what you’d hoped. Why?

  • They’re terrible for mobile (64% of web browsing, if we include tablets)
  • In an effort to make sure everything gets its moment to shine in the 10 to 20 seconds a user is likely to be on a page, screens are often programmed to advance too quickly for people to read them
  • The movement naturally turns off people who are tired of online advertising (aka just about everyone)
  • They tend to be a junk drawer of information the company wants to push out, rather than information users want—which flies in the face of the very first, most important rule of good marketing

ShouldIuseacarousel.com offers the quickest compilation of data from University of Notre Dame, Nielsen Norman Group and others to support these insights. The truth is, very few people click on carousel slides (1%) and when they do, most (89%) click the first one. You’re actually depressing response by giving internal stakeholders what they think they want.

 

Bring your homepage plan back to the user.

It may be internally unpopular for you to say no to every department wanting a presence on the home page, but it’s not about the company. It’s about the user. People want control over their browsing experiences, so a smart home page makes it easy to find what they need rather than force it on them.

The only time you might want to consider a carousel is when you can satisfy three requirements. A carousel may be acceptable if it:

  1. Saves the user time and clicks
  2. Gives the user control of the show
  3. Is not the hero of the home page

It can absolutely work in ecommerce, your bio page or an actual image gallery. Just not as an excuse not to make a decision about what’s the most important thing you want to say.

It’s true that choosing one message and putting a stake in the ground is really, really difficult. But your audience isn’t really likely to be “anyone who may stop by.” You know who is buying (or influencing) so talk to them. If you have multiple primary audiences, then give each one its own landing page and market hard to drive them there.

If you need help figuring out who you’re talking to, what they want to know or how to get your messaging to them, let us know. FATFREE is here to help you motivate eyes, clicks and action.