With Google’s recent statement they were going to give increased importance to the loading times of a website’s home page (and penalise accordingly slow loading sites), could we be seeing the return of the Splash Page?
Here’s a favourite Splash Page of mine - Ginko Gardens
Splash Pages – Counter to ‘Usability’ and SEO best practice?
Much like hard copy brochure covers, splash pages typically contain very little content. Instead what you find is Flash animation, a striking image, a fancy tag line or a brief intro spiel advertising what the site is about. Throw in a logo, a keyword optimised footer and you’re done!
From a user’s perspective, splash pages are just one more click to make to get to the content they’re after. So they’re a big waste of time.
Splash Pages = Low Exit Rates
For website designers and online marketers, splash pages aren’t necessarily all bad news. For one thing, they can load pretty quickly (which given Google’s recent pronouncements is good news) and they usually offer a low exit rate.
Assuming few users leave the splash page and pursue their journey further into a website, that could have some SEO benefit. Search engines are known to value positively websites with low exit rates on their top web pages…
Is Google encouraging the return of the Splash Page?
So could Google’s latest pronouncement in favour of fast load times further encourage the use of splash pages? And doesn’t that run counter to usability best practice?
Imagine the web populated by useless splash pages. They would no longer contain Flash (as Flash increases load times), but they would be extremely content light to upload fast and would likely require users to click on to get to the content they’re after.
With savvy web marketers around… That scenario is not so hard to imagine.
Your thoughts?