Should you have a slider on your B2B homepage?

No. The short answer is no, you shouldn't have a slider on your homepage. Sliders, particularly in hero position on B2B homepages, are bad for engagement, conversion, performance, and search engine optimisation. They provide no real benefit, so avoid at all costs.

When it comes to designing or updating a B2B homepage, there can be a lot of forces pulling in a lot of directions. There can be different opinions about the company's value proposition, desire to give multiple messages prime position, creative temptation to make things more sophisticated, promotions to run, events to announce, news to share, and so on. 

With all this going on, it's understandable that, from time to time, a homepage design will feature either a slider/carousel or scrolling text in the hero section, as a way to meet the demands placed upon it.

However, using sliders, carousels, and scrollers, has a range of negative impacts that are just too severe to ignore. And they far outweigh any perceived benefit.

In a nutshell, sliders:

 

• Make it harder to communicate your proposition to visitors 
• Waste the crucial first few seconds of any visit
• Make your website less discoverable, meaning less buyers arrive in the first place
• Impair your page's performance, increasing the risk that buyers become impatient and leave

All of this leads to fewer good-fit buyers arriving and going on to become high-intent leads.

Need more convincing? Here's how sliders create negative impact on your website's performance.

Movement distracts the brain

The whole purpose of a hero section is to get a key message across, which implies that the user needs to read something. In B2B, this is usually going to be the value proposition on offer. However, it's well proven that movement is very effective at distracting the brain from other tasks, such as reading. We each have a limited cognitive load, and each additional stimuli uses up this precious resource.

Anything that moves — sliders, scrolling text, auto-play video, etc — reduces our ability to concentrate on the words, and the degree to which we absorb the information presented.

Even if your slider isn't auto-forwarding, the promise of movement is hard for the human brain to resist and you can often see users clicking slider controls to give themselves a hit of movement. And not because they are diligently consuming each message presented.

Multiple messages - missed opportunities

Having the option of putting forward multiple messages, be they value propositions, unique selling points, solution benefits, or even news and events, creates a two-headed beast of a problem.

1. It allows you, the business, to avoid deciding what you really offer, who you really serve, what really matters to your buyer, and what you really stand for. Instead, it permits you to present multiple versions of these. This diluted approach to positioning weakens the strength and impact of all messages, not just some of them.
2. It assumes that buyers will give equal attention to all the messages presented. They don't. As seen in many areas of marketing, users give significantly more attention to the first thing they see than to any that follow - the primacy effect in action. So, the effort that goes into creating the second or third slide or statement is rewarded with far, far less attention.

Awful accessibility

Sliders have a variety of usability and accessibility challenges that are hard, if not impossible, to fully resolve. 

For individuals with visual impairments, users with disabilities, and non-native speakers of the page's language, sliders can be very difficult to interact and engage with. They can easily disorientate screen readers, for example, or make it hard for users to reach small controls with assistive technology before content moves.

Excess code bloat harms SEO and performance

While it isn't completely unavoidable, it's common for the title on each slide of a slider, or in each iteration of scrolling text, to be wrapped in the all-important H1 tag.

While it is not confirmed that H1s are a direct ranking factor, we know they play an important role in telling search engines and their users what a page is about. And when H1 titles match the page's target keyword, results are usually better. So, having more than one H1 title on a page is universally considered a bad idea. 

In addition, sliders, scrollers, and videos require you to load more code (such as jQuery, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS) and assets (images and video files) into the browser to function. This can slow down page speed and potentially put your homepage into dangerous territory in terms of the user experience and Core Web Vitals, which may negatively impact your ranking positions in search.

So what should you do instead?

Now that you know just how many drawback sliders, and similar devices, present, you're no doubt thinking about what works better in B2B website design.

The single best way to engage a visitor, even a returning one, is a static message and image. The message should clearly convey your value proposition - what you do, who you do it for, and the problem it solves. The image should support the message - an image of your software or an image/illustration that reinforces the statements made, for example. Just try not to steal attention away from the copy.