A Homepage That Autoplays Music

The site

An event venue with a genuinely attractive site: good photography, a clear layout, and a booking enquiry form.

On loading, a piece of music begins at what appears to be full volume.

The control to stop it is a small speaker icon at the bottom right, on top of a photograph, in white.

On a phone the icon is behind a menu that has to be opened first.

The inference a visitor makes

• Where is that coming from.
• People are looking at me.
• I cannot find the control.
• I will close the tab.
• I will not come back.

The fourth is the outcome for a meaningful share of visitors, and it is faster than finding the button. Closing a tab takes about half a second and hunting for a mute control takes several more.

Nobody defends this in the abstract

Which is worth noticing about the decision.

Ask anybody whether websites should play music without being asked and they will say no.

Ask them about their own site and there is a reason: it sets the mood, it reflects the venue, the music is part of the brand.

All of which may be true and none of which survives the office at nine in the morning.

The decision is nearly always made by somebody who has only ever viewed the site alone, at home, with the sound already down.

They have never once experienced it the way an ordinary visitor does.

Where visitors actually are

Which is the argument that lands.

At a desk in an office with colleagues.

On a bus with other people.

In bed beside somebody asleep.

In a meeting, looking something up.

Or on a phone with headphones in at an unexpected volume, which is the version people remember.

In none of those situations is unrequested audio welcome, and in several it is genuinely embarrassing.

A worked example

A venue removed the autoplay and kept the music as an optional player on the gallery page.

Time on the home page rose, the bounce rate fell noticeably, and enquiries rose over the following quarter.

The music player on the gallery page was used by almost nobody, which was the finding they had not expected.

The music had never been contributing anything except when it was forced.

They kept it available because the owner liked it, which is a perfectly good reason for an optional feature.

It is not a good reason for an unavoidable one.

The distinction between available and unavoidable is the whole of the argument here.

Everything a visitor chooses for themselves is fine, and everything imposed on them without asking is the problem.

The same applies to autoplaying video with sound

Which is the modern version of the same decision.

A background video is fine muted and is the same problem the moment it has audio.

Browsers now block autoplaying sound in many cases, which means the site behaves differently for different visitors and nobody has tested the version that plays.

So a site may be playing audio for a minority of visitors while the person who commissioned it never hears anything.

Check on a browser that permits it before concluding your site is silent.

The safe position is that nothing on the site makes a sound unless somebody pressed something.

If you keep it, the control has rules

Which almost no implementation follows.

It must be visible without scrolling, on every screen size, with enough contrast to be seen against whatever is behind it.

It must be reachable by keyboard and announced properly, since somebody using a screen reader now has audio playing over the thing they are listening to.

That last point is not a minor accessibility footnote; unrequested audio makes a site unusable for anybody relying on speech.

It must remember the choice, so muting on one page does not unmute on the next.

Meeting all four is more work than removing it.

Autoplay is a proxy for something else

Which is worth saying to whoever chose it.

A site with autoplaying music was usually built to impress rather than to work, and other decisions on it tend to follow the same logic.

Look for the other symptoms: a full-screen introduction, an animation before the content, a slider nobody advances, and text over moving video.

Each of those is the same instinct producing a different obstacle.

Removing the music is worth doing on its own, and it is rarely the only thing.

Check what else loads before the content

Since the same instinct usually produced more than one obstacle.

Music is rarely alone: it tends to arrive alongside a fade-in, a loading animation, or a full-screen image that has to be scrolled past before anything can be read.

Each of those adds a second or two before a visitor reaches the thing they came for, and together they add up to a site that feels slow regardless of how fast it actually loads.

Time how long it takes from tapping the link to being able to read the first sentence, on a phone on ordinary mobile data.

Anything above about three seconds is worth attacking, and the decorative layer is where the seconds usually are.

The counter-case within the site

The photography here is excellent and the venue looks superb.

The enquiry form is short and the availability calendar is genuinely useful.

For a venue, mood matters more than for most businesses, and the instinct behind the music is not wrong.

A site for a recording studio or a musician has a real argument for making audio available prominently.

Available is the word doing the work; even there, it should be a button somebody presses.

What to change

1. Turn off the autoplay.
2. Check for autoplaying video with sound.
3. Test in a browser that permits it.
4. Offer the music as a button.
5. Look for the other symptoms.
6. Watch the bounce rate.
7. Keep nothing that makes noise unasked.

Step three matters because browsers block this inconsistently, so the person who commissioned the site may never have heard the audio their visitors are hearing.

The video version is covered in videos that autoplay on mobile data.

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.