A Homepage Slider Nobody Waits For

Five slides, five seconds each

The top of the home page is a large photograph with a headline across it. Five seconds later it slides away and another takes its place, then another, five in all, with small dots underneath.

The owner has seen every slide many times. Most visitors see one.

They read part of a headline, scroll down or tap a menu item, and the rest of the rotation plays to nobody.

The slider was meant to show everything the business offers. In practice it hides four-fifths of it behind a wait nobody chooses to make.

What a visitor actually does

Somebody arriving on a home page is trying to establish two things quickly: whether you do what they need, and whether you look trustworthy.

They read the first thing in front of them and move on to find the rest. Nobody sits watching the top of a page to see what it will say next.

On a phone, the thumb is often scrolling before the first slide has finished loading. The slider becomes a large picture people scroll past.

And the visitor who does stop to read is often caught mid-sentence as the slide changes.

What a slider costs

• Page weight: every slide's image loads, whether anybody sees it or not.
• Moving text that changes before anybody finishes reading it.
• Tiny controls, dots and arrows far too small for a thumb.
• Text over photographs, hard to read and often cropped on phones.
• The look of an advert, which visitors have learned to skip.
• A decision avoided about what matters most.

The last is the real cost. A slider is usually what happens when five messages compete for the top of the page and nobody chooses between them.

Why they get built

Every business has more than one thing it wants to say first: the new service, the seasonal offer, the award, the team, the reason to choose you.

Choosing one means telling the others no. A slider lets everybody have the top spot, in turn.

Many themes and page builders also arrive with a slider already in place, so it is there before anybody has asked whether the page needs one.

The cost in speed

The images in a slider are usually the largest on the site, sized to fill a wide screen edge to edge.

Most sliders load all of them as the page opens, along with the script and styles that make the slider work. On a phone connection, that is a lot of weight for the one picture the visitor actually sees.

Many also hide the first slide until their script is ready, leaving a blank space or a spinning icon at the top of the page in the meantime.

A single image, sized properly, does the same job at the top of the page for a fraction of the load.

Moving content and accessibility

WCAG, the accessibility standard most rules refer to, has a requirement for exactly this. Content that moves on its own for more than five seconds, alongside other content, needs a way to pause, stop or hide it.

Many sliders have no pause control at all. The ones that do usually hide it in a small icon.

The requirement exists for real people: slow readers, people using screen magnifiers who see only part of a slide at once, and people for whom constant motion is uncomfortable.

A worked example

A family dental clinic in a suburban plaza had five slides on its home page: a whitening offer, the team, new patients welcome, direct billing to insurers, and a community award.

The front desk kept answering the same two questions by phone: whether the clinic took new patients, and whether it billed insurers directly. Both answers were on the slider, in slides three and four.

The rebuild replaced the slider with one statement and one photograph of the actual reception. The statement said family dentistry in the neighbourhood, new patients welcome, direct billing to most insurers, with the phone number and a booking button beneath.

Whitening moved to its own section further down. The team got a section with real names and photographs, and the award became a single line near the bottom.

Every message survived. None of them has to wait its turn any more.

One statement instead

The space the slider occupied has one job: telling a first-time visitor what you do, where, and why they might trust you.

A plain sentence does that. A real photograph of your premises, your people or your work supports it. A phone number and one clear action sit beneath.

All of it is visible at once, on a phone, without waiting for anything to move.

Where the other slides go

Into sections further down the home page, each with its own heading, where people who scroll find them in their own time.

Onto their own pages, when they deserve more than a sentence. A service that earned a slide probably deserves a page.

An award or a professional membership fits in a short line near the contact details, where people deciding whether to call tend to look for reassurance.

A genuine offer can have a slim banner with an end date, and the banner should come down on that date.

The counter-case

Not every rotating image is a problem.

A gallery the visitor controls, further down the page, is a different thing: they chose to look, and they decide when to move on. Photographers, venues and builders showing finished work use them well.

And a business with one dominant seasonal message may reasonably change the top of the page each season, as long as only one message is there at a time.

What does not work is automatic rotation at the top of the page standing in for a decision. Make the decision, and give the top of the page to one message.

Replacing it

1. List every slide and its message.
2. Choose the one a first-time visitor needs.
3. Write it as one plain sentence.
4. Pair it with a real photograph, sized properly.
5. Put the phone number and one action beneath.
6. Move the others into sections or pages.
7. Give any offer an end date.

Step two is the one the slider was built to avoid. Everything else on the list is straightforward once somebody decides what the top of the page is for.

Expired offers left on the home page are part of the same problem covered in your footer still says 2018.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.