I conducted a poll from August 2011 to August 2013 asking – do you pay attention to sliders on websites? I offered 4 responses to this. After more than 26,000 votes, I decided to close the poll as it was a nice slice of the total blogging community.
Before I get into detail, each vote was tabulated by IP address to be fair and as accurate as possible. Those who had asked for clarification on what was a slider were told that they were basically rotating images, or rotating images accompanied with words that were seen on many business and blogging sites.
The vote options were:
- What are sliders?
- Yes, if the image is cool.
- No, I don’t care
- No, because the image sucks.
The results were:
Do you pay attention to sliders on websites?
- Yes, if the image is cool (66%, 17,293 Votes)
- No, because the image sucks (13%, 3,498 Votes)
- No, I don't care (13%, 3,422 Votes)
- What are sliders? (7%, 1,892 Votes)
Total Voters: 26,105
Loading ...So, as per the results, the majority within the poll were attracted to well designed images. I have created an infographic to show these results.
Do you agree with this poll?
hi thanks for this nice post this was a good article about the seeking attention to slides and websites
A good slider with good images is pretty much impossible to find. Personally I love them, but got sick to death of faffing around with the image to size it for the slider, and then having to start all over again to make it mobile responsive. I also know that I inwardly cringe when I see an image that doesn’t fit and as I was no longer committed to playing with the images I removed it altogether.
Nile…I have to say that I definitely NOTICE sliders…but I rarely pay attention to them. I mean…I am a human being….so if the graphics are interesting, my eyes will watch…but I am rarely interested. It seems that almost all marketing messages are the same to me.
If you ever have time, I would love to see a study on the types of sliders that actually engage people. I think most people look…but what does conversion look like after the attention is caught? That, for me, is the question of the century.
Beautiful infographic…and way to go on getting such an involved study completed! Thanks for sharing these results with us!
Personally I tend not to pay attention to them but I have them on both sites I run because they definitely work.
Hi Nile, Since I have a food blog I use a slider to display some of my food images and the feedback on it has been positive. I think that slider images do work well for your blog if the images are good and help promote the message of your blog. Thanks for doing the poll.
It surprises me that some people are unaware of the sliders 😀 haha ..i feel sliders are attractive and they add a lot of value to a website(depending upon the design of the blog/website) if used .
-Pramod
As the famous saying a picture is worth thousand words. I believe, if slider image is carefully selected and designed it will definitely get noticed.
No, I do not agree. Sliders just help your page load more slowly, something you DON’T want. What’s better? Just ONE great original image! Blog on!
HI Dave! That’s fine if you don’t agree, although for some time, I’ve had a featured image slider on my site that some of the images did quite well, and my site STILL loaded under 4 seconds. Although my poll is closed, that is not what the majority would say. Also, you can use WPSmush.it for your image’s and still retain quality. One great image is okay, but I will actually be sharing a study on the anatomy of the perfect Featured image slider soon.
Yes, definitely I agree with the voting result. Sliders catch the attention at a first look when someone is visiting to a site. Basically, it works much better for ecommerce sites. And I also tried to get my client’s views about adding sliders to their site and most of them preferred it 🙂
Really interesting Niles. I have a slider on my newest blog but I disabled it because I didn’t like the look of the post thumbnails when I used the slider. But I may have to give it another look. I also recently found a free slider plugin that I may play with now that I’ve seen your poll results. Thanks for the inspiration!
surely!!!!! why not??
generally the sliders are cool… yes it will be irritating if the server or net is slow..
but if the slider is innovative them it will get my attention..
Most of the time I ignore sliders if the first pic is not so interesting
Hi Nile,
Thanks for sharing the poll result. It’s surely valuable for many of us in this particular interest.
Hi Nile,
Your poll result is absolutely right, I am using slider from beginning and it make blog live and active. but only there is one problem with slider .ie It makes your site slow in loading first time….
Thanks for sharing your research…
Hey Nile,
That’s pretty cool. Images are important! I know when I place an image on my fan page I get more activity then when I don’t. Just text is pretty boring for sure. I thought it was interesting that you did this poll over 2 years and the answer is clear – images speak volumes!
Hey Nile,
Thanks for this informative share. It will very helpful for me. But I face some problem in slider, i.e the loading time increase after using slider.
Hi Nile,
It was nice seeing the results of this poll. The number of people that responded also encourages me to try polling my readers too. Ok.. so I must continue to invest in cool images!
Nice poll. Sliders are really annoying, but you can live with it when images are cool or have some valuable informations.