With the constantly changing and developing technology, more trends are coming in the future, especially anything related to gadgets or devices specially developed for the internet access. Nowadays, people can’t avoid gadgets or the internet, because let’s face it; it has become more useful and practical to live with that. You can find almost everything on the internet; you can even shop or buy anything without having to go out of your room. Of course, sooner or later, more trends are coming, which means, more businesses are coming too. Why? That’s because with the trends and more developed technology, many business owners see this as an opportunity – the opportunity to sell more sales to more customers.
One of the ways to “invite” more customers to a business is through building a website. If you are a business owner, whether it is a small or big business, it is important to have a website. A good website is the one that provides useful information and unique content that are readable and accessible. Therefore, if you have a website, one of the important elements to make a good one is the web design. By applying the right and suitable design, you can increase the opportunity to get ranked high in search engines.
Now with the new trends coming, there are many design layouts that you can choose in order to create an attractive website. One-page web design, for example, is a major design trend that even until now, is still used by many designers to create modern websites. If you have a one-page website and is packed with content, you can use infinite scrolling to help visitors read your content easily. That being said, infinite scrolling itself has its pros and cons. What are they? Keep scrolling down to find out!
What is infinite scrolling?
Infinite scrolling is one of the popular design techniques that let visitors who are viewing a website see more and more content as it is loaded when being scrolled down, making it an “endless” stream of page of content. The common examples of infinite scrolling that you might often see are popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can see from their feeds, they definitely use infinite scrolling to keep loading more content as you scroll down to the bottom of the page. While this technique is useful for some people, there are also people who find it difficult. Well, let’s see the pros and cons of applying infinite scrolling technique on your website’s design.
The pros of using infinite scrolling
Many designers use infinite scrolling, for these reasons:
- Retaining users – using infinite scrolling is a great way to make visitors stay interested in your website for extended periods of time, as more new content keeps appearing when they scroll down. This encourages them to stay and interact more with your website.
- Visually attractive – yes, infinite scrolling is made for visuals. You can set limitless number of images with no limits on the sizes and shapes. Of course, it looks really attractive. Who would get bored seeing cool visual content? Remember what the statistic says: “90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.”
- Browsing made easy – people know how to scroll. It’s as simple as that. There are so many scrolling techniques that might be hard to understand for some people. However, infinite scrolling makes it easier for visitors to browse your website page. All they need to do is just move down the page, and they can already see more content from that.
- Encouraging more creativity – using one page with limitless content, you can surely find more interesting ways to convey messages or share information or stories to your visitors.
- Good for mobile – well, infinite scrolling is definitely made for mobile users. Why? That’s because mobile is made for scrolling. Now with more developed technology, most people use touch-screen mobile phones. Of course, without a doubt, infinite scrolling works well with touch.
The cons of using infinite scrolling
After reading the pros, now let’s move on to the cons. These are the reasons why some designers choose to avoid using infinite scrolling:
- No footer information – every website should need footer in it, because footer provides vital information about the website, such as contact, location, or social media information, privacy or security notices, copyright information, and many more. Using infinite scrolling might be impossible for you to provide footer information; therefore, it is suggested that you really know what you need to be included on your website, so that you can decide whether or not you should use infinite scrolling for your website.
- Not ideal for those with specific needs – if you offer many products or services, it might be difficult for visitors to search for specific products or services due to having too many options.
- SEO friendly? Not really – one of the most important parts to reconsider this is whether it is SEO friendly or not. Since infinite scrolling pages are essentially one single page, it only has one meta description. This can cause difficulties for people to find relevant information about your website, since it is also hard for search engines to find more relevant and detailed information about your website.
- Difficult to navigate back to specific items – when we find the specific items on the website, we would want to access it back later, but infinite scrolling makes it almost impossible to navigate back to the items we want to, even though we already bookmark it.
- Slow…loading time – sometimes it can load fast, but sometimes it loads really slow, and worse, it can crash any time, unexpectedly. When you miss out on the important part, you would have to reload the page, and unfortunately, you would be back to the starting page so you have to start over again.
That’s the pros and cons of using infinite scrolling on a website. While it is good for some people, it might be a bad experience for other people. However, until now, this has been in discussion for some time, as designers are looking for solutions to handle this problem. So far, sticky footers are one of the solutions for footer information. That being said, make sure you know what you need for your website. If you have high quality creativity, make sure you combine with logic as to how your creativity works well with the web design. Consult to your web designer to formulate solutions if you really need to use infinite scrolling for your website. If you haven’t got a web designer for your business yet, feel free to contact us and let us help you with your website.