We recently discussed the most important features to include in a website slider, including promotions, seasonal services, hot topics, and more. Having valuable content in your homepage slideshow will enhance your website design and improve your search ranking as a whole. In this article, we’ll go over the top five features NOT to include in a website slider so you know what to avoid in the future.
1 – Old Sales And Promotions
Ever get a coupon from a restaurant that was already expired when you received it? Wasn’t that frustrating? If you keep old promotions on your homepage slider, you’re essentially doing the same thing in the virtual world. Once a promotion ends, make sure you remove it from the slider and replace it with new content. Save a few slides as drafts on your site so you can use them as quick fillers between promotions.
2 – Outbound Links
Backlinking to other websites is a great way to build authority to your blog posts and webpages, but that practice is best reserved for the posts themselves. If you put a link to another website right on your home page, you are telling your visitors, “Go here. This place is WAY better than my site!” This will increase your bounce rate and diminish your site’s value overall. If you want to link to another website, create a post or page on your site that points to the other resource. Then you can promote your own page on your home slider.
3 – Off-Season Services
As important as it is to promote seasonal services in your slideshow, it is just as important NOT to promote off-season services. Don’t promote snow removal in the middle of summer or air conditioner repair in the chill of winter. To keep your website relevant and up to date, you need to promote services that change with the time of year.
4 – Error-Ridden Content
Before you even think about promoting a webpage or blog post on your slider bar, you need to make sure it is free of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. Drawing attention to a poorly written page with make people question your site’s integrity altogether. In general, you should be watching out for errors on all of your pages because they can hurt your Page Rank and SEO campaign. You always want to create quality content for your site that will give off the best possible impression for first-time visitors.
5 – Pages That Are Already Successful
Your homepage gives you an opportunity to promote webpages that may not be getting the attention they really deserve. If you have a longstanding page that is highly successful, don’t waste a slide emphasizing that. If the page is still new, you can keep it on the slider because it is still promotion-worthy, but once it becomes “old news,” find a new page to draw traffic to.
Keep your website slider as up to date and valid as possible, and you will be able to take full advantage of this powerful design add-on.
