What’s Parallax Scrolling and How Does It Affect Your Website
One technique that has been gaining some momentum in web design is Parallax Scrolling. But of course, not everyone is familiar with it. So here is a breakdown of the necessary things you need to know about it.
What is Parallax Scrolling?
Parallax scrolling is a web design visual effect that makes the background of the page to move along when scrolling down. It enables the background to move at a slower rate than the foreground, creating a 3D effect.
The term was coined from the stunts developed in the 2D gaming where they use various background images to establish an illusion as the game progresses. This same concept for web design opens up a number of opportunities for several activities because users will most likely stay to scroll through the pages.
Another thing it does is it allows you to click on the navigation link, which will then jump you down to that specific section you desired. So instead of clicking around and going through the entire website just to find some information, parallax makes the content design contain everything all on one page.
How Does Parallax Scrolling Affect Your Website?
Parallax scrolling, just like most things, is created for its benefits. However, it can’t help but have some disadvantages also. Here are some of them:
Benefits of Parallax Scrolling
- Convenient – probably one of the main things anyone who has ever visited a website with parallax scrolling is its convenience. This technique is very easy to execute and makes viewing the website navigable. Accessing articles is then not complicated with the different links around.
- Visual Effects – of course, the best thing about parallax scrolling is its visual effect. It just makes a webpage much more appealing to the eyes. Through it, the business story of the website can become very engaging.
Disadvantages of Parallax Scrolling
- Slow Loading Page – Since parallax scrolling requires a lot of technical stuff and computation for the script, the loading time of the page may become slow. Those with a slow Internet connection and even those using their mobile devices will especially feel this. And when the website takes a long time to show up, you know that it’s not going to be great with the user experience.
- Not Good to SEO – With parallax websites, you will actually have to visit one or two pages utmost since it aims to compress everything. However, this does not look good with SEO. Search engines usually prefer websites that offer numerous, content-rich pages. And unfortunately, Parallax does not provide that.
- Incompatible with Browsers – Different kinds of browsers have their own way of making websites. Due to the way Parallax website works, where it compresses everything, they may find it tricky to have various kinds of browsers adapt. What works for Google may not for Mozilla. So you have to go through a number of testing.
- Tricky for Analytics – Finally, parallax may prove difficult in terms of analytics. Since all content is lumped into one page, identifying which one is capturing more visitors could be hard.
