Shopify CRO QuickTip #4 — Remove Your Homepage Slideshow
You want to please the visitors to your Shopify store.
You’ve seen others do it, so you do it yourself— you put 2-3-4-5 slides at the top of your homepage. All in the hopes some of the promos will push the visitor’s buttons to explore your products.
And that’s when you’ve ruined the hero section on your homepage.
3 Reasons Why Slideshows Don’t Work For Your Visitors
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Most slideshows change way too quickly for people to have time to read and process them. On the contrary—if the slides change way too slow (or not at all), most people won’t wait to see them. They won’t flip through them. They’ll scroll down not noticing the slideshow at all.
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Having a slideshow on your homepage shows a lack of clarity and understanding about your visitors. Promoting everything means you are promoting nothing. Having more than one slide dilutes the focus of the visitor.
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Considering the fact that anything but the first slide rarely gets seen, your slideshow is just a waste of resources. It usually adds 2-3 seconds to your overall homepage load time. This, despite your good intentions for pleasing the visitors, actually results in increasing bounce rate. You are wasting more of the traffic you worked so hard to bring.
Get 3 Benefits For The Price Of 1
To speed up your homepage, reduce your bounce rate and actually have people engaging with your promo, just use a static image.
How?
- Out of all the slides, pick one. The most important. The one you would like your visitors to really notice.
- Then if using an Out of the Sandbox theme, remove the slideshow component from your homepage
- Add new content to the homepage with the “Image with text overlay” component.
- Recreate your chosen slide. This will give you a static hero image with a call to action. Just like your slideshow, but without the slides you don’t need.
Presto, you now have a faster and less confusing homepage!
If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!