Somewhere in a boardroom near you — or perhaps even on your own Figma board — a familiar request is being made. It comes from a well-meaning stakeholder, marketing manager, or founder who’s just seen a competitor’s site and utters the words:
- Let’s add a carousel to the homepage.
To which the design team winces, the dev team sighs, and the strategist drafts a tactful message to explain why that idea, though aesthetically popular in 2012, should remain buried next to Flash websites and visitor counters.
Because the homepage slider — also known as a carousel, rotating hero, or “banner of indecision” — is not just outdated. It’s actively harmful to user experience, performance, and conversion rate. And yet it persists. Like a stubborn design fossil. Like a zombie. Like Internet Explorer 11 in layout form.
This blog is not merely a roast of carousels (though that’s fun too). It’s a breakdown of why they fail, what the data shows, and — most importantly — what to do instead if you want to showcase multiple ideas or offers without punishing your users.
The UX Problem: Users Don’t Sit and Watch
Here’s the brutal truth: most users don’t even see the second slide.
Numerous studies — including those by the Nielsen Norman Group and analytics firms like Baymard — show that the overwhelming majority of interaction occurs with the first slide only. Often more than 90% of clicks happen there. The rest? Ignored. Or worse, frustratingly missed as the carousel auto-rotates past the thing they were about to read.
Users don’t scroll hero banners like they scroll TikTok. They’re task-oriented. They scan. They don’t wait to be entertained by transitions. In fact, auto-advancing slides can cause banner blindness, cognitive dissonance, or even motion sickness on poorly timed transitions. Not exactly the first impression you want.
And if your carousel includes navigation arrows or pagination dots? Most users don’t even notice them. Let alone click.
The Conversion Problem: Multiple CTAs Mean No CTA
Here’s a basic principle of behavioural psychology: when people are given too many choices, they make none.
Carousels almost always present multiple calls-to-action — one per slide, each with competing messaging. One slide promotes a feature. The next, a blog post. The third, a pricing page. It’s a digital tug-of-war.
The effect? Diluted clarity. Reduced click-through. And an elevated bounce rate as users fail to grasp what the site is really trying to say.
Clarity beats cleverness. Always. And a carousel, by design, withholds clarity until the fourth second — assuming the user stays that long, which they rarely do.
The Performance Problem: A Hidden Speed Tax
Carousels are not free.
Even if you build them “light,” they come with multiple background images, duplicated layout wrappers, slider libraries, JavaScript transitions, timers, and conditional logic for mobile interaction. All of which add weight to the page — usually in the most critical rendering zone: the top.
This affects Core Web Vitals. It delays Largest Contentful Paint. It can break lazy loading. It creates layout shift. And it increases the probability that your mobile experience, where every kilobyte counts, becomes sluggish and untrustworthy.
When speed is a ranking factor, a UX signal, and a conversion multiplier, loading four versions of your homepage hero is no longer a neutral design choice. It’s a liability.
Why Carousels Still Exist
This is perhaps the saddest part. Carousels don’t exist because they’re effective. They exist because they’re politically convenient.
Stakeholders love them because they allow multiple messages to occupy prime real estate. The product team gets a slide. The blog team gets a slide. HR gets a slide. Everyone gets a slide.
The homepage becomes a design compromise instead of a strategic asset. And the user becomes the loser.
In short, carousels exist because they solve internal alignment problems — not user problems.
What to Do Instead
The answer isn’t to collapse everything into a single, frantic headline. It’s to prioritise. Here are strategic replacements (in prose, not bullet points — we’re keeping it classy):
First, pick a primary message for the hero. The job of the homepage is not to summarise everything — it’s to orient the user. What do you do? Why does it matter? Who is it for? Get that right, and users will find the rest. Confuse it, and they won’t even scroll.
Next, use visual hierarchy to showcase secondary messages below the fold. Cards. Sections. CTAs. Structured content zones with space to breathe. These allow you to surface multiple offers, but in a scannable, navigable way — without hiding them behind animation cycles.
If you truly must show rotating content — say, for testimonials or client logos — make it manually scrollable. Let the user control the interaction. Don’t force them to play whack-a-mole with your messaging.
And finally, remember: clarity converts. Motion distracts. Simplicity wins.
The Final Word
Your homepage has exactly one job: to communicate your value clearly, confidently, and fast.
Carousels don’t help. They hide. They distract. They slow things down. And they create an experience optimised not for the user, but for internal politics.
So let this be the line in the sand: if you’re serious about conversion, if you care about UX, if you want to build a digital brand that feels deliberate and trustworthy — retire the slider.
Replace it with clarity. Replace it with purpose.
And build something that’s actually built to work.