Based on many factors and experiments, the answer looks to be a big YES! But not essentially all ugly websites are bad websites!
If you have ever used a premium WordPress theme or using Wix and Squarespace to design your website, you are familiar with those nice big images at the top of the website. We call it hero image.
It could be implemented in different ways. Sometimes it is a background image and there are some text on it. Sometimes it is a slider that has different slides scrolling automatically and there are some animation and text on the slides.
We love those nice hero images. Our website visitors like them. They make our website cool and beautiful. But!
But, Google does not like them. We got the comment recently from Google search engineer John Mueller who said “It does affect ranking — negatively.”
What it means is that, those nice hero images can have negative effect on our web page ranking on Google search results.
But Why?🤔
Because Google likes that website visitors to see some content before they need to scroll and those hero images occupy a large amount of space and keeps the real content far from top of the website. So, visitors should scroll to be able to reach to the main content.
The solution is to add more content above the fold. It means, let your website visitors to get some idea about your website before they require to scroll a little down to reach the main content.
As a website designer, when I deeply think about this hero images, I can say that they are not really essential for many websites. They make websites load slower, they are not look nice on mobile devices and finding a high-quality big image to fill that part of the website is always an issue. So, why not think different and try to design our websites without those bulky hero images?
P.S. You can forward this email to your friend by simply clicking on “forward” in your email app or if you are reading it on web, simply send the web page to your friend🥰
