Here’s a Question I Was Asked:
I have slider images on my website. Is that fatal?
My Answer:
I actually just did a video about sliders two days ago. Just in case you don’t know what a slider is… it’s usually but not always on the homepage. In a slider, the picture slides in and then the text will fade in really slowly. And then the picture slides to the right and another picture slide in plus more text fades in as well.
They look really, really nice. But they will absolutely kill your conversions. I call them conversion killers because we have seen it on many occasions. In fact, we actually had a perfect example:
A Case Study
We have a criminal defense attorney in Long Island, New York. And, we took over his website and we were looking at his numbers. He was getting a lot of traffic to his website. We couldn’t figure out why the phone wasn’t ringing.
We have call tracking, so we can see that he’s actually not getting phone calls, but we also see all this organic traffic going to his website. And this is after we got him to number one for Long Island criminal defense attorney. But they just weren’t called. The website wasn’t converting.
Now, this was six or seven years ago. This was the first client that we ever had. And he’s still a client today.
Basically, I read an article that sliders absolutely destroy conversion rates. So we switched it out for a static image and I mean, it was a light bulb moment. The calls just started coming in and started coming in and really haven’t stopped for almost seven years now.
Why Web Sliders Don’t Work
Stupid things like that can make a big difference. So get rid of the website slider. It’s like people have such ADD nowadays, they get so much thrown at them in the on-demand world that we live in. You’ve got maybe three seconds to get someone’s attention. Otherwise, they’re on to something else.
You know that you’ve got an attention issue and you’re basically moving images around in front of somebody who’s really not paying attention anyway. It’s just not a good idea. And once you get rid of it, it works way better.
Check It Out Yourself
Next time you on a website where there’s a slider, look at the website and then, a couple of minutes afterward, think of what the text said or what the message was in the slider. You probably won’t be able to do it. And that’s the same thing your clients are doing. They go to your website, and if you have a slider, they’re not paying attention to your message or your call to action. Get rid of it. Use a static image. That’s my answer.
