In this episode, Jules White takes a stand against carousels, revealing why they can sabotage your website's conversions and what you should do instead.
Jules explains why showcasing testimonials and social proof in carousels is a missed opportunity, as visitors often scroll past them without engaging. Instead, she recommends strategically placing these valuable trust elements throughout your page, especially near call-to-action buttons.
Key Takeaways:
- The Problem with Carousels: Learn why carousels can waste valuable content and negatively impact user experience and SEO.
- Alternatives to Carousels: Discover effective ways to showcase social proof and testimonials without hiding them behind a carousel.
- Maximising Social Proof: Learn how to make testimonials more impactful and skimmable, focusing on the problem and solution.
- Optimising Your Website: Jules reminds you to prioritize clarity, simplicity, and user-friendliness over flashy features.
If you're looking to improve your website's conversions and boost your bottom line, this episode is a must-listen!
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AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS
Introduction to Carousels
Hi, so I wanted to talk today about carousels and I always have a, I was going to say I love hate relationship with carousels, but I don't, I, it's a hate, I hate, I hate, hate relationship. One of the things that people often use carousels for is to display reviews and testimonials. And this is one of your most valuable parts of your website, like really, really valuable. One of the most valuable parts, because It's your social proof, and they often do that as well. If they're another form of social proof is the companies we've worked with. So using the logos of companies that you've worked with or, as featured in those kind of things is usually People are either using a carousel in their hero section, or they're using it for some kind of social proof.
The Value of Social Proof
And the reason I don't like it is because, essentially, your social proof is one of your most valuable things. It's going to help people to understand why they should trust you, the kind of results that your clients or your customers have got from using your product or service. And by hiding it behind a carousel, you're wasting a lot of that value there.
So when we look at our own websites, we look at it and we would look, we would wait for the carousel to flip through and read it. And when we're looking at our own website critically and thinking about how we can improve it, we tend to do that. So we, we won't look at it necessarily as a user at the website would look at it, whether that is somebody that has visited our website before or is coming to our website for the first time, we need to make it scrollable and carousels tend to waste a lot of the value in them because people will keep scrolling down the page.
They won't necessarily stop and wait for a carousel to flick through and it might be your most valuable testimonial that just happens to not be at the front when that person is scrolling down the page. The alternative to that and the way that I tend to recommend using your social proof is to have it dotted throughout your page. So anywhere that you've got a call to action, if you've got a button where you're asking people to take action, make sure there's a little snippet of your, your, of a testimonial or some kind of social proof, or even if that's, you know, rated five stars by 150 plus happy customers or something along those lines, having a little bit of that.
When (Not) to Use a Carousel
Next to a call to action button immediately makes it more likely that people will convert and actually click that button. So I was trying to think, I was just driving, I was just thinking, are there any times that I would recommend using a carousel? And realistically, I would probably say no. You can use them for, say if you were a restaurant and you had loads of pictures of all of your amazing foods and you could maybe add it in to add a little bit of interest.
I would definitely not recommend using it in your hero section. That's often where people and places like restaurants and things or photographers would use carousels in the hero section. And the problem with doing that is again, people won't, Wait for it to scroll through especially in your hero section. That's that's that section where you've got that Three seconds to grab people's attention and realistically, then we want them to keep scrolling down the page as well.
So in a hero section as well, because that's then shifting content, Google isn't keen on content that shifts on a page and a carousel does classes content shift on a page because it's changing, but essentially it's changing what's actually visible there on the screen at that moment is changing. So using that in your hero section might then immediately in terms of the performance of your website on Google, it may put you at a disadvantage. The other thing is that a lot of people will not have optimized their images. So the image file size is massive. And that then you've then got three times the amount of images trying that are slowing the website down.
Testing Carousel Impact on Page Speed
So I certainly would be aware of that as well. If you do make that decision, no, I want to use a carousel somewhere in my, my website. I'm going to use it a bit lower down the page and just use it for. So like images, make sure that before you put it onto your page, you test the page speed so you can do that. I think it's called pagespeed.net. You can go on or if you just go to Google and type in page speed, you can find a way to test your page and test it before and test it afterwards and do both mobile and desktop as well.
So that you understand what the, what the implications of having that carousel are in terms of your page speed. But I definitely wouldn't recommend it for those valuable parts of your website like. The testimonials, the, these are the companies we've worked with. If you wanted to have something like a scrolling bar, then that might work for your companies that you've worked with, because it's not something that you need people to stop and read.
So, I, that possibly could work, but, I still would recommend not having it as a carousel. So having it as a, a scrolling bar can sometimes, can sometimes work, but not all website builders do that. And FEA Create, you can't do that at the moment, as far as I know, unless that is built into the carousels. How then can you display your, your testimonials?
And I think the reason that we often put them on carousels is because we're thinking we want to just get more, get loads of them on the page. We want to display them all these, you know, this is our fantastic proof. We want to display it. Be thinking about how you can dot them throughout the page. And anytime that you are using any testimonials, think about how you can make them.
Making Testimonials Skimmable
The testimonials themselves skimmable and how you can maximize the effect of them as well. So if you've got a big long testimonial, if you're lucky enough to get a big long testimonial from a client, pick out the bits that showcase the problem that the client was experiencing and how you solve that how your solution sort of solved that problem.
Because that way you can make it into a skimmable eye catching thing that someone can just literally read almost as they're skimming past it on the page, and then maybe you could put a little headline on that, so pick out the most valuable part of the testimonial and put that as a section heading, and then underneath that actually then go into a bit more detail. I would never make a testimonial a big chunk of text because people just won't read it.
So, you know, maybe one to two sentences would be the maximum I would use from one particular testimonial. And you can, as I say, you can break that apart and use that, that same testimonial from the same person in different places on your website. So it then also increases the amount, it makes, you know, makes it look like you've got more testimonials. If you're, if you are sort of lacking on them, then that's a way to do that.
And it's not being dishonest. It's, you know, you're not saying that these are different people, but if somebody happens to see it on your about page, and then they see a different one on your homepage, then maybe one or the other will catch their eye a bit more and they're more likely to read it. When you do that, Think about what's the most valuable parts of those testimonials and pick them out and then when you've got those one to two sentences bold the parts of it that Are most valuable as well.
Conclusion: Reconsidering Carousels
So somebody could literally read the heading and the bolded parts and get the gist of that testimonial then that's really helpful to do that. That's my thoughts on carousels. I hope It just makes you think before using them. That would be my big thing is I would say, rather than thinking, Oh, new feature, this is going to make my website more interesting, because that I think that's why we use them, because we're scared.
We look at our website, we're so used to seeing it, that We think it's boring and we get bored of looking at our own website. Even if we absolutely love it, we still get bored of looking when we look at our own website and think, how can we make it more eye catching and more interesting for people? Whereas what we should actually be thinking about is how can I get more people onto this page?
So thinking about what, what keywords are there, what am I actually saying on these pages on my website that will bring more traffic in and how can I help those people convert? and make sure that they take the action, the one action or the two actions. If it's, you can have a direct call to action. If you want someone to buy from you, you could then have a transitional call to action of sign up for my freebie, but you wouldn't want to have any more than those two, ideally just one per page of what action you want people to take.
Final Thoughts on Carousels
And then what's the most likely thing to help them doing that. And adding a carousel to your page is really, Realistically not likely to do that, but dotting your testimonials, your social proof, dotting it throughout your, throughout the page is much more likely to make that happen. So I really hope that's helpful. And I'll see you soon.
