Comment on WordPress Hacks by SEO Dave.

WordPress Hacks The Stallion Responsive slider does sometimes act a bit weird at times, the images don’t fill the box and requires a refresh to work correctly. I don’t know what the cause is, but since sliders use a lot of javascript I would guess it’s something within the javascript (pretty much the only thing it could be).

I added the slider (to Stallion 6) because WordPress post sliders were popular at the time, but I personally don’t use them in 2014 for SEO reasons.

They require additional javascript code, this has an impact on pagespeed (how fast a page loads) which Google uses as a ranking factor.

Run your site through Google’s Pagespeed Insight Tool http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ with and without the slider active and you’ll see the difference.

If you do the research you’ll find users tend not to click on sliders, so though they look nice they tend to be ignored. there’s an interesting discussion at https://yoast.com/opinion-on-sliders/

So cool feature, but has negative SEO impact and users apparently don’t click them. If stallion Responsive was only for my use I wouldn’t have kept the slider feature, but some users like them so made the best SEO version possible.

In the Stallion Responsive 8.0 release I modified the slider code from Stallion WordPress SEO 7.1 to be fully responsive and to use less resources: the responsive version has no images associated with it and the output is better SEO’d. But it still needs additional javascript files loading, so has the negative SEO pagespeed issue.

Compared to other sliders it’s much better SEO wise, most use images and have zero SEO built in, the links tend to have awful anchor text for example.

Though I don’t advise using WordPress sliders, if you do use the Stallion Responsive slider. If you disable the Stallion Responsive slider under the Stallion options pages it has no negative impact on SEO, when a Stallion Responsive feature is disabled via an options page it’s like the feature doesn’t exist (WordPress doesn’t load any of the resources).

David