Image slideshows, sliders, or whatever you name them. When it comes to web design, these image sliders are evil. Even though you can do some research and find the opinions of developers and UX/UI designers, they also agree on the same point about image sliders.
However, you will still find them. The foremost reason is that slideshows, particularly in the hero section, are so pervasive that numerous clients see them as essential and continue to request them. They have turned into a homepage standard.
Image sliders are considered among the numerous website design and development factors influencing small and large organizations. While genuinely average, the vast rotating images can be terrible for SEO and better user experience. Thus, you should rethink the use of sliders on your website. Perhaps next time you think of an image slideshow, try to use some of the best alternatives as we will discuss in this guide.
What is the Problem with Image Sliders?
The majority of businesses would love to attract visitors to their websites to increase revenue. It is an opportunity to inform potential customers about their products and services in order to increase sales. The best solution for this is to pack a lot of messages into a set of rotating sliders and place them in the hero section of the website so that users will see them.
However, in actual situations, studies suggest that visitors merely click on image slides, which might result in a hectic schedule or less time for users. Thus, most customers move to another page before the next slide moves on.
Consequently, sliders are negatively impacting the website’s loading speed. Thus, the image slider requires more time to load the page as it contains more images, so the more time it loads, the more your customers have to wait. Whereas, if they have another website with fast loading, why would they remain on your website?
Apart from this, slow page loading could also affect your SEO on search engines. Since Google has been utilizing web page speed as a component of its ranking algorithm for a long time, a slow website can make it harder for your business to move to the highest ranking online. Thus, it is time to shift to some of the best image slider alternatives.
List of Image Slider Alternatives
As the image slider is considered an old-fashioned and less effective method, numerous substitutes are available with more effectiveness and usefulness for the website. Below are some of the best image slider alternatives that you can use:
1. Hero Image
A hero image is a beautiful and recent alternative to image slides. It gives a full-width image that you can set on the top section of your landing page and outwardly gives an excellent visual message in the main note. Besides displaying attractive headline notes, it likewise incorporates a solid call-to-action that lets visitors know what they ought to do now, giving a straight-forward next step that can assist with eliminating the guesswork from the situation while convincing them you comprehend their issues and will solve them by visiting the page.
2. The collage
The perfect combination of attractive visuals offers each its own source of inspiration, which is specially intended to tempt customers to plunge further into your website. The college consists of different images with different deals. Each deal requests an alternate kind of visitor depending upon their requirements, which can assist you with addressing numerous personas at every turn. If you feel like your hero image or message is a bit limited, adding the collage may be an extraordinary move for projecting a more extensive net.
3. Lead Generation Form
A lead generation form urges your customers to give their contact details or other significant details with the goal of receiving something from you consequently. The visitors might be requesting more information related to your products and services, making a reservation, or they might be downloading some attachment consisting of a buyer’s manual or eBook. The lead generation form would be an intelligent move to showcase your service and grab visitors’ attention to your website.
4. Search Form
Search forms are, in many cases, seen on websites that have numerous products and services, such as eCommerce or some real estate businesses. Thus, users can utilise the search form to filter their search to find a particular category on the website. This form allows visitors to peruse everything on the website. A simple search form on the cycle is required.
5. Establish a streamlined design
Usually, websites add useless conventional design elements to their websites. It looks like quite an old choice and even confuses the visitors with various options. Consequently, they tend to switch to another website. Thus, it would be great to remove all standard design components from the hero section of the website and make it simpler with a smooth design. However, this choice may seem unusual for most clients, yet it is an excellent step to offer the best user experience to visitors. Thus, having a smooth and streamlined design and a minimalistic distraction for users will help you achieve the goals.
6. Focus landing pages
Rather than depending on a slideshow to deliver all the information about your new features, products, and services on the website, it would be better to limit the focus and customize the experience for all visitors. With focused landing pages, when clients visit your site, they are given the relevant information and are not overburdened with the entirety of irrelevant knowledge. It is an extraordinary method for drawing in your visitors without using a slideshow.
7. Videos or animations
If you want to add attractive animations and motions to your site, you must consider using videos or animated GIFs. GIFs’ movement and engaging animations acquire more attention from visitors and add one more degree of context to your content. The 3D motions and animations assist in directing visitors to where their eyes need to go.
Videos, in addition to animated GIFS, are another way to convey your message while attracting more visitors. It is additionally an excellent strategy for making sense of complex information for users through motion. Video conveys messages in a fast and more accessible format that users find easy to digest. Perhaps, viewers hold 95% of a message when they get it from any video source, compared with 10% while reading on a website.
8. Smart content
You can use the intelligent content implementation on the website to deliver a specific message to different personas on your landing page. Smart content is promptly accessible in HubSpot, making an experience customized particularly for website visitors depending upon their interests or previous actions on your webpage. In addition to this, it delights visitors with customized expertise, yet it also gives them one clear message.
Conclusion
You must understand that image slider are an old, less effective method and even negatively impact your business growth. Therefore, it is usually not recommended to include sliders on the landing page or other sections of the website. However, there are rare instances where using an image slider is acceptable. If a hotel wants to promote a limited offer, for example, they can use a slide to feature the new proposals, followed by another slide describing the guest experience, the food experience, and so on.
My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.
