Do you need animation and a carousel on your website?

There are certain elements that can elevate a website and can make visitors go wow. In this article, we will look at some of the most popular features and see if they are really needed.

Animation

Animations can have a real wow effect, whether it’s a photo that has a zoom effect or a header that crawls in or a milestone that quickly counts your results. They are engaging and entertaining, however, they can slow down your website.

A small movement here and there is fine but try to avoid your website looking like a PowerPoint presentation in the 1990s where images were flying in from left right and centre. It’s not only outdated and unprofessional, but also slows down your website.

Carousels

It may look very trendy to have a carousel on your home page. You know where you have to swipe to see the next image or it automatically changes to the next image after a while. This only looks good on desktop (remember over 60% of the people are looking at websites on their phones) and sort of loses the point on a mobile view. Besides, most people don’t even wait for the second photo to appear. Last but not least, it also affects your site speed and can make your site slower.

Videos

The world is undoubtedly moving towards videos, that’s why Instagram and Facebook are too prioritising Reels in order to keep up with the video giant YouTube and social media platform TikTok.

Adding videos to your website can be beneficial, however, it does matter how you add them to your pages.

If you want to add videos, make sure you embed them instead of uploading them. Uploading means you would upload a video on your site like you would upload images using your WordPress media library. Whereas embedding means you are using a third-party site like YouTube.

Of course it means you need to register on YouTube and create a channel to embed your videos on your website or share the video’s URL. But that’s the correct way of doing it, otherwise your site will really struggle and slow down massively.

So do you need animation, carousels or videos for your website?

It comes down to personal taste at the end of the day. However, I’d advise:

• avoiding using carousels (It’s still widely used by professional websites, but don’t be tempted. A fast and functional website is better than a fancy feature.)
• using animations wisely – less is more. A highly aesthetic website still can be achieved without many animations.
• embedding short videos.

Hope this helps.