A lot of websites love to use a slider on the homepage or within posts for photos. It looks sleek and offers a rotating array of content. Having sliders on your website gives your site a minimalist aesthetic, but did you know sliders can actually hurt your SEO?

Here are five reasons to ditch your website slider and use an alternative layout.

1. Visitors Ignore Photo Sliders

Readers don’t want to click through anything to see what you have on the site. Only 1% of users actually click through a slider, according to research.

If so few people interact with your site through this element, why use it? It may look good and give your site a sleek design, but it’s not doing anything for your visitors.

In addition, many sliders don’t work well on mobile. And mobile visitors are important to your site’s traffic.

2. They Slow Down Your Site

One of the biggest complaints about sliders is that they slow down your site’s load time. There’s a lot of code in a slider in addition to the images. And that takes time to load.

If you have an image-heavy website, a slider can make your site even slower. And if your site loads slowly, visitors are less likely to return.

It’s recommended that your site load in less than 3 seconds to keep your readers. But image sliders can increase that time and frustrate visitors.

3. They Get Mistaken for Ads

It’s not the design’s fault. It’s more than advertisements on websites have adapted to look more like content. And some of them look like sliders.

Because they look like ads, readers tend to overlook them. This explains why so few people click through them.

4. Auto-Forwarding Gives Little Time to Read

This is important if your slider is on the homepage with the article title and a description. Auto-forwarding only gives users a few seconds to read the content on each slide.

Sometimes the user looks away from the screen for a moment and misses the content. Rather than going through the images and content at their own pace, they’re forced to wait.

The other problem with auto-forwarding is that it takes control away from the reader. The reader wants that control and doesn’t want to always miss something. Many users consider this element to be annoying.

5. It Doesn’t Help Your SEO

Your site depends on search traffic, which is why you focus on SEO. But a slider won’t help with that. It may not hurt your SEO, but it’s not worth using if it doesn’t help either.

If you use a slider, you need to have adequate text on the page to maximize SEO. This can lead to unnecessary text that also won’t help your search ranking.

Ditch the Sliders

There’s debate as to whether or not it hurts your SEO, but it definitely doesn’t help. It can slow down your site and even annoy your readers.

It’s best to get rid of the sliders and choose a better design for your website that’s equally attractive.

If you have questions about options for a better design, contact us. We can help you find the best design and improve your SEO.