The attractiveness of your e-commerce site’s home page partly determines your chances of attracting new customers, and keeping your visitors on the site until they place an order.
Can adding a carousel to your Prestashop site increase your chances of turning visitors into customers?
Let’s find out exactly what a web carousel is, what it’s for and how to set it up on Prestashop. 
What is a carousel?
Also known as a “Slider” or “Slideshow”, a carousel is a slide show presented on a web page.
The carousel can feature text, images and sometimes short videos.
Each slide can appear with a transition effect.
The most common are, of course, horizontal or vertical translations or fades.
Scrolling is often automatic, but can also be manual.
A navigation system in the form of arrows, dots, numbers or thumbnails lets you move forward, backward or even display a particular slide.
The carousel is most often placed on the site’s home page.
Why add a carousel to Prestashop?
The carousel has the significant advantage – provided you choose your content carefully, of course – of allowing you to condense a large amount of information into a small space.
As the various messages are displayed one after the other in the same space on the web page, you save space.
You can, for example, display the best-selling products at the moment, present a list of comparable products (selected, why not, dynamically according to the information you have on the visitor) or even news items: competitions, promotions…
In general, carousels allow you to highlight important content, while varying the way you present it.
By definition, a page is designed to scroll from top to bottom.
By introducing a different navigation with a carousel, you add dynamism to the page.
It attracts the user’s attention, arouses curiosity and retains interest.
Advantages and disadvantages
As we’ve seen, the carousel has the advantage of displaying a large amount of information in a small space.
On the other hand, the carousel has a number of significant disadvantages.
Poorly positioned and, above all, poorly fed, the carousel can lead to confusion.
Each slide contains a message.
If they’re too different from one another, visitors won’t necessarily be able to make the connection between all the information presented and your e-commerce site.
The overall message contained in the carousel must therefore be particularly clear and contain the important information you wish to communicate to your visitors.
On the other hand, with automatic scrolling, there’s a risk that your visitors won’t assimilate the messages and information you wish to highlight.
Many ads use dynamic content.
It’s also possible for your visitors to get confused and miss the actual content.
Scrolling should be fast enough to give the page a dynamic feel, but slow enough to give visitors time to read all the content.
The presence of a Prestashop carousel on a page can also have an impact on its performance.
It’s important to balance the content of the carousel correctly, and not to use images that are too large, for example (avoid images larger than 50 Kb).
Even with these precautions, carousel loading is likely to delay page display by one or two seconds.
This can have a negative impact on the user experience, as well as on page ranking.
Setting up a carousel in Prestashop
As is often the case, installing a module is the key to implementing a new feature in Prestashop.
Carousels are no exception.
There are several modules available to enable you to set up a carousel on your Prestashop site.
To find them, simply go to the “Modules” menu and search for the keyword “carousel” or “slideshow”, for example.
Modules are not free, and are generally priced between 70 and 120 euros.
Choose a module that allows you to manage the size of the carousel on the page.
The carousel must also be responsive.
Once the module is installed, set the scrolling speed, delay and transition type.
You can then select and customize the images to be used.
You can, of course, modify the position of the images in the slides, changing the order in which they appear.
And don’t forget to add a title, description and alternative text to each of your images (for accessibility and SEO purposes).
Once the carousel has been created, all you have to do is define the page on which it is to appear.
To conclude on the Prestashop carousel
Used improperly, carousels can be a burden on your e-commerce site rather than an asset.
It is therefore important to follow certain rules to limit its impact on site performance, while at the same time providing added value for your visitors.
The first slide must contain the most important information.
The carousel should contain no more than three or four slides in total.
Last but not least, the carousel must be responsive, and visitors must be able to take control of it, pause it or easily access a particular slide.
I can help you design and implement an effective carousel on your Prestashop site.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me so that we can discuss your needs and find the best solution together.
