Sliding banners – you see them on top of many websites. Many designers love them, because they gain more space to apply their art. But do they help you sell more?

Sliding banners are everywhere. Regardless of where you look on the Internet: you are bound to come across those big banners at the top of websites which slide across the screen to make space for another banner with yet another image.

Designers love them, because they give them more space to work with. And you can create so many different effects with them. They slide to the side, fade out, explode, split and more. Just about any effect you want can be applied to reveal the next image.

Sellers love them too – because they look cool, and because they see them in so many places. From websites of the biggest companies right down to the smallest.

So banners must be good, right?

And if big companies use banners, they must be good, right? After all they have all the money to check if they are good for sales.

And what’s good for them, must be good for your online store,  right?

Just get a designer to create some great images for you, get one of those thousands of banner generators you can find online and whack a banner onto your site.

If you believe designers, your sales should promptly grow.

Killing your sales gently

Except they don’t.

Quite the contrary.

Despite their good looks and what some designers tell you, sliding banners are sales killers par excellence.

In fact the case against sliding banners on websites is so overwhelming, that it makes you wonder how they ever became popular in the first place.

When Suzuki recently tested a sliding banner on one of their website, they lost 28% in clicks. That is a huge number of clicks and potential sales lost.

Visitors who don’t click, don’t buy.

So that cool sliding or rotating banner on your home page  not only takes up a lot of space on your site.  It also gets ignored by users and generates almost a third fewer clicks than a properly placed image.

So much for trusting what everyone else does!

Remove banners immediately

Tim Ash of Website optimizer Siteturners puts it bluntly: “Rotating banners are absolutely evil and should be removed immediately.”

The reality of banners is, they get hardly clicked on, distract users from the important content on the page and cost you sales.

Regardless of which web optimization company you talk to – no one makes a case for banners.

The sad truth is, that website visitors ignore banners – regardless of how cool they look.

On some sites this is so bad, that the first image of a banner slider gets only 1% of all clicks on the page – and the following banners even less.

Do you really want to wast so much website space of a function which does not convert your visitors to buyers?

It’s not about design

When you start an online store or you add a shopping cart to your social media outlet, it is important to understand, that selling is not about design. It is not about cool.

It is first and foremost about sales.

The design is simply a tool to encourage your visitors to buy your products or event tickets, or to make a donation.

If your site has to look cool to attract the right buyers, then generate a cool look without sliding banners – regardless of what your designer says.

It’s not the sales which have to bend around the sales – it is the design which has to bend any which way it can to get you the sales.

Any design element which gets in the way of a good sale should be removed.

Stop following the herd and tread your own path to your buyers.

All the best,