An argument against sliders!

Since the invention of WordPress and other CMS systems, freedom of creativity in the web design industry has increased significantly. Today, you don’t need to have both incredible technical skills and artistic talent in order to create a beautiful website. You only need the second and a little of the first.

Still, the fact that you can create a website “just as you want it” in terms of design, doesn’t mean you should ignore the speed problems that come along with some of your design choices.

For every extra second, a website is estimated to lose 11% traffic and 7% conversions.

Speed matters! In my opinion, we should always keep in mind that:

1. A website is, first of all, a business machine. Its goal is to attract and convert customers.
2. What benefit does it have to create a masterpiece, if 40-50% of the audience clicks the back button and doesn’t even get to see it?
3. It’s not just about money. The fact that you’re annoying or even insulting fellow humans with you’re slow page speed is the real problem. Losses in profits are just a reflection of this ugly behavior towards customers practiced by that particular business.

Down with the sliders!

As the manager of a WordPress performance optimization company (Turbo Web), I have seen many websites with all kinds of design elements, themes, and plug-ins. If I were to pick one thing that I would like to see removed from web design usage, it would undoubtedly be sliders. If you’re curious about why many people, especially speed optimizers, hate slider, then here are some reasons:

Reason nr.1 – They’re super slow 

The performance problems brought by having a slider loading at the top of a page are huge. From my experience, we’re speaking about at least one second added into the above-the-fold loading time.

When it comes to speed optimization, the most important number is the time it takes for the upper part of the page to load. All websites optimized by us end up standing between 0.5s and 1.5s speed index tested in WebPageTest. Adding over 1 second into this number is not something you want to be doing.

The reason sliders are so slow is the fact that they need to load a ton of javascript and CSS besides the images. They also require more than one picture to get loaded, since a slider usually has more than one slide. All of this happening above the fold! And these images also cannot get lazy loaded.

Reason nr.2 – Nobody watches them

Studies have also shown that almost nobody watches sliders. People just scroll down and continue reading the page. That’s if they didn’t leave already due to slow speed.

Reason nr.3 – Everything looks the same without them

You know what the coolest part is? The page will look identical with a picture instead of a slider. I know you might find this hard to believe, but give it a try! You will be surprised.

Conclusion

Before deciding to use a slider, it’s important to calculate whether the benefits outweigh the downsides in that situation. More often than not, they don’t.