Can I talk to you about sliders?

No, not the tasty little hamburgers. I’m talking about the slideshows on a website that rotate through a series of photos.

There are thousands of different slider plugins out there, and it seems that every site has caught onto this trend like a viral infection. Everyone seems to want one, but let me ask you this question:

Why would a slider be a good idea for your site?

If your answer is because your competitors have one, then that’s not a good answer. Let me give you some facts about sliders.

• Only about 1% of users click on a featured item in a slider. Of that 1% that clicked, 89% of those clicks were on the first slide.
• Sliders take up a lot of real estate on your site, but the vast majority of people are missing that information, especially after the 2nd slide.
• When a user lands on your site, they have landed there because they are looking for something. If what they are looking for isn’t a slideshow of photos, then you aren’t giving them what they want and they are going to miss the information they want.

The slider is a nice way of adding a little pizazz to your site, but that’s pretty much all it will do. The vast majority of people are not going to wait to see all those slides. I’ve had clients come to me and request sliders with 10 or 20 or more photos, and my question always is, “WHY?” Because almost nobody will see those photos.

The best way to show photos to your users is in a nice photo gallery that allows them to choose photos to look at, and enlarge the ones they want to see.

The day of the slider is fading fast. It’s time to really focus on the information your users want, and give them that. Don’t design for your competitors and don’t design for yourself, design for your customer. They will be glad you did.