Swim Against the Tide: Why No Slider on the Home Page

Open almost any online shop and the first thing you see is a slider: three, five, sometimes eight banners taking turns at the top of the page, each one a campaign someone wanted on the home page. It is so common that leaving it out feels like forgetting something.

When we built the home page of caruselbooks.ro, a bookshop and publishing house, we left it out on purpose. The page has one hero, one image and one message at a time. We think that was the right choice for a publisher, and here is why.

A magazine has one cover

Pick up any issue of Vogue. It has one cover, one photograph, and that photograph says something: what this issue is about, what the magazine thinks matters this month. Nobody at the magazine believes that five covers would sell five times as many copies. Choosing the cover is the editorial work.

A book works the same way. It has one cover, and a good one tells you, at a single glance, what kind of book you are holding.

That is what a hero is for. It is not a place to park every campaign; it is the page saying “this, right now”. A slider is a way of not choosing. When five messages share the top of the page, none of them is the main one, and the visitor is left to work out what you meant to say.

We sell books, not everything. For a shop with an editorial voice, the home page is a magazine cover, and a magazine cover is one image.

Nobody waits for slide three

The second reason is simpler: sliders don’t do what they promise.

The figures most often quoted come from Erik Runyon at the University of Notre Dame, who measured the carousels on five university sites in 2013. On the main site, nd.edu, about 1% of visitors clicked the carousel at all, and 89% of those clicks went to the first slide. On each of the five sites, the first slide took the largest share. Slides two to five, the ones that make it a slider, got almost nothing.

The Nielsen Norman Group found something worse. In one of their usability tests, a user was asked whether Siemens had any special deals on washing machines. The answer was on the home page, in the largest type on the screen: a discount on Siemens appliances, next to a large photo of a washing machine. But it sat in a slider that changed every five seconds. She gave up and decided there were no deals. “I didn’t have time to read it,” she said. “It keeps flashing too quickly.”

Movement pulls the eye, and then it takes the eye away before the message has landed. People have learned that a moving banner at the top of a page is advertising, and they scroll past it. The attention a slider costs rarely comes back as a click.

Speed

The third reason is the one visitors feel without knowing it.

The large image at the top of the page is usually the last big thing to appear, and its arrival is the moment people take as “the page has loaded”. It is also the moment Google measures when it judges how fast your page is. A slider puts several large images and the code that cycles through them right in that spot, and it often makes the page jump as the slides settle in. A single hero image can be prepared for exactly the size it will be shown at, and the page can reserve space for it before it loads. Most of our readers arrive on a phone, often on mobile data, so this matters more than it might seem.

What we did instead: two kinds of cover

Leaving out the slider doesn’t mean every week looks the same. The hero changes often, and editors choose between two kinds.

The editorial hero is built for speed and for collections. It puts an author or a collection at the centre, with short, sharp text and a modest image. The image can sit on the left or on the right, so the page doesn’t look the same every time the hero changes. It is quick to put together, and it suits the quieter books: non-fiction, science, the kind of book you choose for what it says rather than for how it looks.

The cinematic hero is the opposite: full width, very graphic, built for maximum visual impact, in the spirit of the Netflix home page. It is meant for the books that deserve an entrance: a big novel, a striking new edition, a launch.

Both are filled in from fields, not drawn by hand, so whichever one is chosen, the page keeps its proportions, its spacing and its speed. We wrote about that approach in Why We Turned Page Builder Off.

One distinction, so this doesn’t read as a crusade against anything that moves: further down the page, we do use rows of books you can swipe through. A row of books is a shelf, and browsing a shelf is exactly what you came to do. The cover is different. It should stay still and say one thing.

When a slider makes sense

We don’t think every shop should copy us. A store that sells everything, from electronics and clothes to cat food, has a different problem: there is no single message that speaks to everyone who lands on its home page. For Amazon or eMAG, a rotating set of campaigns can be a reasonable compromise, because there is no one cover that would fit them all.

But if your shop has a point of view, whether you are a publisher, a fashion label or a store with a taste of its own, the home page is the place to show it. Choose the cover. Your visitors will see one message instead of missing five.

You can see the result on caruselbooks.ro, and read how the whole store was built in the case study.