Single page website is one of the latest trends in the web world. This technique is great for some business types while for others it can be awkward. It is always recommended that you do some basic research, study some facts and figures and after some consultation preferably with web development professionals decide whether it’s worth adopting a single page website and it’s going to suit your requirement.
Long scrolling can be a great alternative to above the fold concept however, it has some drawback. It may work for some while it may not for others. Here is the quick rundown of the pros and cons of long scrolling trend. First, we will check out the positive side:
Long Scrolling – Why It Is Trending
If you think people don’t read below the fold, think twice. According to Chartbeat – a data analytics provider, collected data from 2 billion visits and found that “66 percent of user time was spent below the fold, not above”
In fact, long scrolling offers designers some pretty exciting opportunities such as it gives them a chance to tell story using visual ling appealing images and animations. Following are the pros of long scrolling:
- Visual effects
- Rather than totally focusing on divided block content, in long scrolling you can build something continual that engage users and make them scroll down – giving them fresh and exciting experience.
- Tell your story
- Long scrolling is flawless for developing a story which certainly turn, encourage valuable user interaction. Find out more here.
- Modern and engaging
- Long scrolling is a modern web design technique which is all about scrolling rather than clicking. It is more personalized for smart device users. It is step away from complex navigation and step towards a unique, simpler and more user-friendly experience.
- Gets to the point
- These days businesses are looking for designers who can distill their vision into single page – make their brand eye-catching, powerful and thoroughly dynamic. This web technique also considered the ideal way to condense a business message into one exciting page.
- Result driven
- Scrolling is quite an intuitive action, whereas clicking to another page user needs a reason, through and motivation. Usually, a single long-scroll page inspire user to take action much more swiftly than separate pages.
Long Scrolling – Cons
Like other web design techniques, it also comes with its own set of unique drawbacks. Following are the cons:
- Time-consuming
- Single page websites take time to conceive, and to create. To build such website, a lot of collaboration is required between client and designer which can be difficult for designer if he got a client with strong opinions. The process of layout creation takes longer time.
- Lacks in SEO
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- When you reduce the number of pages, you are probably giving Google less pages to index thus less chance to rank well for different keywords. However, you can overcome this – check out blogs from Quick Sprout and Moz.
- Slow page speed
- Many web owners’ avoid long-scrolling due to its performance issues. Well, any design with lots of videos or image can slow the website speed, especially if it is a parallax-scrolling website because it mostly relies on JQuery and JavaScript. However, there is a solution of this issue which can be found here.
- Navigation
- Since there is no ‘back’ button available, users have to scroll back each time which can get pretty frustrating. An ideal solution to overcome this problem is to create a sticky top navigation which means users won’t have to keep scrolling back up to access previously viewed content.