Website carousels grab attention faster than any static image ever could. These rotating displays showcase multiple pieces of content in a single space, making them perfect for highlighting products, testimonials, or key messages without overwhelming visitors.
Examples of websites with carousels reveal how top brands create engaging user experience through smart design choices. From e-commerce giants like Amazon displaying product galleries to Netflix featuring movie trailers, carousels have become essential for modern web design.
Understanding effective carousel implementation helps you:
- Improve engagement metrics and reduce bounce rates
- Showcase multiple offerings in limited space
- Create dynamic visual storytelling experiences
- Optimize mobile browsing with swipe gestures
This guide examines real-world carousel examples across different industries. You’ll discover what makes certain designs successful, learn from Bootstrap and jQuery implementations, and understand when carousels enhance rather than hinder your website goals.
What Are Product Carousels?
Often defined as slideshows, galleries, and sliders, website carousels let you showcase images, graphics, video, and text in one movable, “sliding” block. They act as a great option for connecting ideas and content, as they let you connect visual relationships between multiple pieces of content.
How Product Carousels Work
Web designers often use carousels as an easy-to-use, elegant, and space-saving way to demonstrate content with more interactivity. They also can be a great way to keep visitors engaged with your page’s content and encourage them to learn more about your products.
Carousels can be easily incorporated into demonstrations for detailed product shots. Doing so gives shoppers more options when viewing your products, as they gain access to extra perspective shots when deciding whether or not to purchase.
Best Practices for Creating Product Carousels
Different websites will design their carousels differently. Some businesses rely on spur-of-the-moment purchases, while others rely on more consistent purchases over time.
As an example, customers often buy luxury apparel and kitchen appliances on quick whims, so vendors, therefore, rely on a good visual first impression. This is why it’s vital to include an inspiring, realistic, and clear view of the options available. Carousels can help users decide between an array of choices, while also leaving the decision-making in the customer’s hands.
It’s also important to connect your customers with their interests, and an effective WooCommerce product slider can do just that. Using WooCommerce, you can design product sliders around your customer’s individual tastes.
Here are a couple of extra tips when building your product carousel:
- Conduct placement experiments. Try to find a location on your website where your carousel will be most effective. To accomplish this, you may need to use A/B tests to find the best possible placement.
- Add user-generated content. Customers are the best marketers you can hire, and they’re free! Ask your customers to post their experiences with your brand on social media using a specific hashtag or thread.
- Adjust to mobile screens. Many of your shoppers will be using their phones or tablets when browsing your products. Your goal should be to design a product slider that can help all of your clientele, not just those on a laptop.
- Highlight special deals. Instead of letting your customers search for deals on their own, you should help them in their search. You can do this by showcasing your limited-time offers on your product carousels.
- Add a shopping cart button. If you include an add-to-cart button in your product carousel, your customers won’t need to worry about switching tabs to purchase. When facilitating an easy buy, try to take away any unnecessary steps for your clients.
Types of Product Carousels
Regardless of your audience or industry, website carousels can be the difference factor for your business. This isn’t to say, though, that each carousel will work for everyone. There are some styles of carousels that are more effective for certain businesses.
Although it could be said that there are thousands of types of carousels on the web, they all break down into the same building blocks. When broken down, a web carousel will be formed by these components:
- Container: Although it’s pretty self-explanatory, it’s still an important part of any carousel. A container simply refers to the space on a page that a website carousel occupies.
- Slide: All carousels are made up of multiple slides. These slides could include content such as photos, visuals, videos, text, calls to action (CTAs), or links.
- Navigation: Navigation refers to the UI elements that allow users to move from one slide to the next. These navigation cues can look like dots, arrows, text, or any other symbol you can think of.
- Animated transitions: Often carousels will include animations or effects to signal the movement of slides. Although it’s not necessary for all carousels, a good animation can have an important effect on customers’
Advantages of Product Carousels Over Traditional Product Displays
There are many contexts in which carousels are useful, but that doesn’t mean they should be placed willy-nilly. They need to be implemented with performance, usability, accessibility, and most importantly, a goal in mind. Try to think carefully about what you want from your website before using a carousel as a crutch. Here are some examples of contexts where carousels are effective.
- When helping customers compare products. A carousel banner can give clients a wide range of sight on multiple products at once, which can help them compare and decide on a purchase more quickly. If you have the goal to showcase specifications, technicalities, or other product info to your clients at a glance, then a carousel can help.
- When the layout is mostly visual. Including rotating images can be a great advantage when your website includes little text, with more emphasis on visual elements.
- When it helps in cross-selling. If you want to suggest multiple complementary products to increase their order value, then a product carousel is what you need. In reality, this is what Amazon uses to convince customers to buy other relevant products when ordering singular items.
Benefits of Using Product Carousels
Product carousel sliders are both visually attractive and proven to increase profits. If you implement them wisely, they can act as powerful engagement tools, and they can increase customer retention rates regardless of your industry or clientele.
Today’s largest worldwide corporations, like Netflix, Amazon, Toyota, and Spotify, use carousels often, and millions of smaller or mid-sized businesses also choose to utilize them. In general, they are a great and easy way to catch users’ attention, promote products or services, and enhance users’ experiences.
Here are some of the main benefits of using carousels.
Better Organization
A carousel slider can easily organize an album of grouped images, products, or even multi-stepped processes.
Carousels do this by organizing your products within individual categories. Instead of overloading your customers with a large grid with thousands of items, carousels group products into simple rows such as “best rated,” “most popular,” and “on-sale.”
Increased Engagement
Carousels can hit that sweet spot between single images and long lists of items. You can use them as quick, actionable hooks that leave your clients wanting more.
Websites are constantly fighting to keep your attention, and good carousel website design can engage your visitors for much longer than a simple image. Needless to say, carousels will likely become a necessary element for effective web design.
Improved User Experience
Using a carousel, you can improve your customer’s experience by facilitating easy movement and providing more information.
Carousels also help keep customers interested by organizing the page and making it more visually attractive. As a result, carousels can be a great way to keep website visitors coming back.
You can even further optimize your carousel design by tracking users’ interactions, and then use that data to improve your site in the future.
Increased Visibility
By combining attractive photos with necessary details like prices, carousels can offer immense value.
Although words are helpful, pictures can prove to hold much more value when people scroll through products, places, people, or food.
Implementing Product Carousels on Your Website
Are you ready to let clients engage actively with your store the second they enter?
You can start by designing an engaging product carousel using the Slider Revolution plugin.
This section will now discuss how to implement a product carousel on your website. If you want to follow along, you will have to download the Slider Revolution plugin. But don’t worry, you will get good use out of it.
As an idea, this concept would be a good way to design a hero image. Not only would it let you show off your most popular products, but it would also highlight their versatility and value.
Step 1: Update the Background Image for Each Slide
To start, you want to focus on the background image of each slide. While replacing one image for the next is simple for Slider Revolution, creating a background takes a little bit more work.
To do this, select “Slides” on the toolbar and click on the first slide to begin. After that, select “Slide Options” and “Background.” From there, you can select the media library and enter your background image.
Step 2: Replace the Traveler Graphic
The “Traveler” layer is an always visible effect on the product carousel. To make this effect possible, you need to place the graphic as part of the “Global Layers” of the carousel template.
To do this, select the “Slides” option on the toolbar and click on “Global Layers.” From there, you will find a list of layers separate from the list you see in your slides. Next, input the “Traveler” layer, and you’re done!
Step 3: Edit the Text and CTA in the Global Layers
While you’re still in the “Global Layers” tab, try to edit the rest of the layers to fit your carousel design before moving back to the other slides. Best to save time when you can.
There are four layers here that you will need to edit:
- The Overlay
- The Sub-Text
- The Call-to-Action
- The Headline
Step 4: Edit the Location Text in the Slides
Once you have finished editing the “Global Layers” tab, you can go back to the slides and finish up your carousel.
There, you can add all the information you want clients to see when browsing your carousel content.
Step 5: Update the Spinning Badge
The last step in editing this template involves the spinning badge in the top-right corner of the carousel. It includes a small group of layers titled “Badge-Content” and multiple images or slides of their own. Each slide is comprised of three components to edit:
- Circle-Bg
- Badge-Rim
- Offer-Text-1
This is just a quick summary, though. You can check the whole tutorial on how to create an engaging carousel for a more detailed walkthrough.
Examples of Websites With Carousels
Amazon
Much like other product-based businesses, Amazon utilizes many horizontal carousels to display its products without taking too much space.
And they use more than just simple homepage carousels; they also use many sub-page carousels to build consistency throughout their website.
Bahama Bucks
Out of all the examples on this list, Bahama Bucks has the most vibrant and lively website to date. They use a refreshing color scheme throughout their website, and this includes their carousels as well. When designing an image carousel for your own website, try to follow a color scheme to build your brand.
Netflix
Netflix uses multiple horizontal carousels to provide viewers with a vast way to slide through movies within different genres and categories. It’s a good example of using a simple carousel UI to help users easily navigate the content of a website.
IKEA
Ikea is well known for its large quantity of high-quality furniture, which can easily cause problems for a simple website. Ikea solves this problem by utilizing organized carousels to help clients find what they’re looking for in just seconds.
Dreamworks
Dreamworks uses an eye-catching homepage carousel to market their newest movie. The entire page acts as a full-screen carousel that moves from slide to slide. This creates a unique experience for users and drives visitors’ attention toward their newest movie. Images snap perfectly and quickly into view to create an immersive experience.
Orizaba Original
One of Orizaba Original’s greatest strengths is its large selection of products. The designer of this site believed, quite wisely, in fact, that visitors should be shown this strength early in their shopping journey.
They do this by switching the image of each product to a different view whenever the user hovers their mouse over it.
This not only keeps clients engaged, but also maximizes the small area of space allotted for each product. It’s easily one of the most unique carousel examples on this list.
LookBook Carousel Design
LookBook Carousel is an interesting carousel concept created with fashion websites in mind. Instead of the common, horizontally formed carousel, LookBook instead auto-plays vertically. Although they are uncommon, vertically rotating designs can facilitate visitors to view your products effectively.
Men’s Wearhouse
Men’s Wearhouse uses sliders to create a vertical website carousel that displays their best-selling products. It’s also a great example of user-based e-commerce (mentioned earlier) in action. Using this, you can display a wide array of products within a category that interests your viewers, and showcase different product types in categories like new products, best selling products, or random products.
Newegg
With loads of different computer parts to sell, Newegg uses many compact sliders to let visitors see them all. They even leave space afterward for a featured products carousel. Out of all the websites with carousels on the market, this one is the most condensed and efficient one you will find.
Au Lit Fine Linens
This website uses an elegant link carousel that gives visitors more ways to move around its other pages. Instead of using a carousel to showcase individual products or categories, this website uses carousels as a “link sandbox.”
Apple Store
Carousels can be found everywhere, and Apple is no exception. To start, the Apple Store greets you with a visually appealing product carousel that draws customers in. From there, the store also uses a color carousel that lets you compare the separate color options of the product you’re interested in.
Toyota
The official site for Toyota Motors Brazil uses a very simple yet effective card carousel that includes a product showcase, CTA buttons, text introductions, and arrows. After visitors enter the site, this carousel will begin its rounds, showcasing different brand concepts and products.
FAQ on Websites with Carousels
What companies use carousels most effectively?
Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, and Apple lead carousel implementation. Amazon showcases product galleries with thumbnail navigation. Netflix displays movie trailers in auto-play carousels. Airbnb uses image sliders for property listings. Apple features product showcases with smooth transitions and minimal dot indicators.
How do e-commerce sites implement product carousels?
E-commerce platforms use JavaScript libraries like Swiper.js and Owl Carousel for product displays. They feature zoom functionality, thumbnail previews, and mobile swipe gestures. Popular implementations include infinite loops, fade transitions, and responsive design across all devices for optimal shopping experiences.
Which JavaScript libraries power the best carousel examples?
Bootstrap, jQuery, Swiper.js, Glide.js, and Flickity dominate carousel development. Swiper offers touch support and modern features. Bootstrap provides ready-made components. jQuery enables custom animations. These libraries ensure cross-browser compatibility and responsive design across devices.
What makes Netflix’s carousel design so effective?
Netflix uses auto-play video previews, horizontal scrolling, and personalized content rows. Their carousels feature smooth animations, lazy loading for performance, and intelligent content grouping. The interface adapts seamlessly between desktop hover effects and mobile touch navigation for enhanced user engagement.
How do mobile carousels differ from desktop versions?
Mobile carousels prioritize swipe gestures, larger touch targets, and simplified navigation. They often remove auto-play features to save bandwidth. Desktop versions include hover effects, keyboard navigation, and multiple visible slides. Both versions maintain accessibility features for screen readers.
What carousel mistakes should websites avoid?
Common mistakes include auto-play without pause controls, missing navigation arrows, poor mobile optimization, and accessibility violations. Avoid too many slides, slow loading times, and unclear visual hierarchy. Always include proper alt text and keyboard navigation support.
Which industries benefit most from carousel implementations?
E-commerce, travel, real estate, and portfolio websites gain most from carousels. Online stores showcase products effectively. Travel sites display destination galleries. Real estate platforms feature property photos. Creative professionals highlight their work through visual storytelling and interactive elements.
How do testimonial carousels improve conversion rates?
Testimonial carousels build trust through social proof rotation. They display multiple customer reviews, photos, and ratings in limited space. Effective implementations include client logos, star ratings, and quote highlights. These rotating testimonials reduce bounce rates and increase credibility for potential customers.
What CSS techniques create smooth carousel transitions?
CSS animations, transform properties, and transition timing functions create fluid carousel movement. Popular techniques include translate3d for hardware acceleration, ease-in-out timing, and opacity changes for fade effects. Modern implementations use CSS Grid and Flexbox for responsive layouts and improved performance.
How do accessibility guidelines affect carousel design?
WCAG compliance requires keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and pause controls for auto-play content. Carousels need proper ARIA labels, focus management, and alternative text for images. Users must control playback speed and navigation timing to meet accessibility standards and inclusive design principles.
Conclusion
These websites with carousels show how rotating displays transform static pages into dynamic experiences. Companies like Tesla, Spotify, and Shopify prove that well-designed carousels increase engagement when implemented thoughtfully with proper navigation controls and mobile optimization.
Successful carousel implementations require balancing visual storytelling with performance. Whether showcasing products through image galleries, displaying client testimonials, or creating immersive hero sections, the key lies in understanding your audience’s needs and browsing patterns.
Modern carousel development leverages:
- React and Vue.js for component-based architectures
- CSS3 transitions for smooth animations
- Touch-friendly navigation for mobile users
- Loading performance optimization
Remember that carousels should enhance, not replace, your core content strategy. Focus on creating meaningful interactions that guide users toward your website goals rather than simply filling space with rotating elements.
If you liked this article about websites with carousels, you should check out this article about mobile carousels.
There are also similar articles discussing carousel UX, Owl Carousel, product carousels, and testimonial carousels.
And let’s not forget about articles on carousel sliders, Bootstrap carousels, ecommerce sliders, and parallax sliders.
