The case against the carousel
Rotating hero sliders survive on trade websites long after the rest of the web abandoned them. Here is what replaces one.
The hero carousel is the cockroach of web design. It survived responsive, it survived the mobile-first rewrite, and it is still sitting at the top of a remarkable number of trade websites.
Why they persist
Carousels solve an organisational problem, not a user one. Four people each wanted their message at the top, so the compromise was to give each of them five seconds.
That compromise has a cost. A visitor reads the first slide, or nothing.
What to do instead
Pick the one thing. For an emergency trade, that is almost always the phone number and the service area. For a restaurant it is the menu and the booking link. For a clinic it is what you treat and what it costs.
The other three messages are not lost. They move down the page, where somebody who is still reading will find them in their own time.
A smaller point about weight
Carousels are also expensive. A slider library, four full-width images and an autoplay timer is a lot of bytes for something most people never see past the first frame. Removing one is often the fastest performance win available.
