Nobody has ever used your hero slider

There is a feature that has been on small business websites for fifteen years, that every client asks for, that every analytics report shows nobody touches, and that will not die.

The hero slider. Five rotating panels at the top of the homepage. Five headlines. Five buttons. Auto-advancing every four seconds, which is either too fast to read or too slow to bother waiting for, depending on how bored you are.

Every study that has ever been run on these says the same thing. Almost nobody clicks past the first panel. A meaningful number of people click the first panel before it slides out from under them, land somewhere they did not intend, and leave.

So the slider does three things. It hides four of your five messages. It makes the page slower, because it loads five images to show one. And it occasionally grabs a click and takes the visitor somewhere random.

The reason it survives is not that it works. It survives because it solves a meeting. Five people want their thing at the top of the homepage, the slider gives all five of them a panel, and everybody leaves the room happy. It is organizational conflict resolution disguised as an interface.

Pick one message. Put it at the top. Do not move it.

If you cannot pick, that is not a design problem to be solved with animation. That is a business that does not know what it sells, and no amount of sliding will cover it.