Engaging your audience from the moment they land on your site is crucial. Websites with carousels do just that, offering dynamic, interactive sliders that capture attention and elevate user experience.
As a seasoned web designer, I’ve seen firsthand how photo carousels and rotating banners can revolutionize a homepage, making navigation intuitive and content compelling. This article showcases top examples of web design brilliance where image sliders seamlessly blend form and function.
By diving into these examples, you’ll uncover the secrets behind effective carousel UI components, from responsive design to animation effects that enhance visual content. Whether you’re revamping your site or starting from scratch, you’ll gain actionable insights to implement JavaScript carousels and CSS frameworks that not only look good but perform flawlessly across devices.
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 are the benefits of using carousels on a website?
Carousels grab attention instantly, showcasing multiple pieces of content within a limited space. They enhance user experience by making navigation intuitive and engaging. Plus, interactive sliders can highlight key messages, promotions, or visuals, contributing to a more dynamic and visually appealing web design.
How can I ensure my carousel is mobile-friendly?
Use responsive design techniques, ensuring your carousel adapts seamlessly to various screen sizes. Implement touch-friendly sliders that respond to swipe gestures. Test on multiple devices to guarantee consistent performance, and leverage CSS frameworks like Bootstrap for smoother integration and functionality.
Are there any downsides to using carousels?
Overloading a carousel with content can lead to slower page load times and affect website usability. Users might miss important information if slides rotate too quickly. It’s crucial to balance aesthetics with performance, ensuring image optimization and lazy loading techniques are in place.
What are some best practices for carousel navigation?
Include clear, intuitive navigation patterns such as arrows and dots for easy slide transitions. Ensure controls are accessible and visible. Enhance user interaction by providing options to pause or manually navigate the carousel, improving overall web usability and user satisfaction.
What are some popular plugins for creating carousels?
Plugins like Slider Revolution are widely used for their ease of integration and customization options. They support responsive carousels, touch-friendly sliders, and various animation effects. These tools simplify the process of adding carousels to any web development project.
How can I make my carousel content more engaging?
Use high-quality visuals and compelling text to capture attention. Incorporate animation effects and carousel transitions to make the slides more dynamic. Align the content with the user’s interests and needs, ensuring each slide adds value and enhances the overall user experience.
Are there accessibility considerations for carousels?
Absolutely. Use ARIA roles and labels to make carousels accessible to screen readers. Provide keyboard navigation options and ensure controls are easy to operate. Accessible carousels improve web usability for all users, including those with disabilities, enhancing the overall inclusivity of your site.
What type of content works best in carousels?
Carousels excel with visual content such as images, videos, and graphics. They’re perfect for showcasing dynamic content, promotions, portfolios, or featured articles. Ensure the content is relevant, engaging, and enhances the user interface, keeping users intrigued and informed.
How do I measure the effectiveness of a carousel?
Utilize website analytics tools like Google Analytics to track user interaction with the carousel. Monitor metrics such as click-through rates, engagement time, and conversions. Analyzing this data helps refine the carousel’s content and functionality, ensuring it meets user needs and business goals.
Conclusion
Exploring examples of websites with carousels reveals how powerful and versatile these elements can be. They bring dynamic content to life, enhancing user interface and making navigation intuitive. When implemented correctly, photo carousels and interactive sliders not only captivate users but also improve SEO by boosting engagement and lowering bounce rates.
Incorporating responsive design and mobile-friendly features ensures that carousels function seamlessly across all devices. By leveraging JavaScript libraries and CSS frameworks, creating visually appealing and high-performing carousels becomes straightforward.
Remember, effective carousels balance aesthetics with functionality. They use clear navigation patterns, provide engaging visual content, and adhere to accessibility standards with ARIA roles.
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.
