Published on February 8th, 2017 | by Guest

What is Parallax Web design and How it Can Affect Your SEO

What is Parallax Web Design?

Parallax, in web design, was coined from the stunts developed in the 2D gaming that used various image backgrounds. The backgrounds images were used to establish an illusion as the game progressed. Parallax design enables the background to move at a lower rate towards the foreground hence creating a 3D effect as one scroll down a page. The same concept used in the gaming activities is applied in parallax web designing, which creates an opportunity for several activities. Parallax design grants a website the ability to ensure that those visiting the page stay longer by encouraging the visitor to scroll through the pages available on the site. Also, the parallax web design enables a higher level of creativity of a firm depending on its size and the industry.

What are the Benefits of Using Parallax Scrolling?

“Wow Factor”- The technique is easy to execute, since it is not complicated to access each article as they have different links.
Storytelling- Parallax scrolling offers you the perfect setting to tell a company’s story in an engaging way. Various layers respond differently to the users scrolling behavior, hence creating a sense of depth that permits multiple story lines.
Engagement- With parallax scrolling, the user is in control. The individual takes an active role in their interaction with the website.

Negative Effects of Parallax Web Design on SEO

SEO Problems- Parallax scrolling can be extremely bad for SEO. Search engines like to see websites which offer users numerous, content-rich pages. Parallax websites are often one or two pages at most. Usually, a site has one H1 header per page. Including multiple H1 headers on the same page cannot be good either. When the entire website’s content is stuffed onto one page, keyword density is affected too.
Slow Loading- Time Parallax scrolling needs some computation for the jquery script, the more content your site has, the longer time the script has to calculate where everything must go to. For users on a slow Internet, a parallax scrolling site is going to be seen as crawling. This cannot be a good user experience, hence we must seriously consider when and how good to use parallax scrolling.
Browser compatibility- Having all the elements which are packed into a parallax page to work effectively across all web browsers will be tricky. For example, a page which renders well in Firefox might not work well in Google Chrome. It will take in depth testing to have everything working properly across all browsers.
Mobile users- Users are increasingly using their tablets and cell phones to surf the web. Having a parallax website render properly on mobile gadgets is once more going to take a lot of patience and time.
Hard to track using analytics- Traditional sites let you track your visitor’s behavior with various landing pages. With parallax scrolling, it’s hard to know which part of a single page is offering your visitors the most value. Timothy McCormack, from a Canada based SEO agency, stated that without the right analytics, a website owner can’t improve the site’s content or web pages to improve conversation or traffic.

How to Overcome the Issues if you Really Have to Stay With Parallax

In spite of many issues that have to be conquered, it is entirely possible to condition a site for parallax scrolling and still have it relatively search engine-friendly.

Since most search engines experience issues while attempting to process JavaScript, it might be a good idea to develop two versions of the website: a static HTML page and a parallax site, which feeds relevant content into the div containers of the one-page website.
On the other hand, different areas from the parallax site may be assigned internal links so that the content can be indexed by search engines. By doing this, numerous pages will be indexed in the organic search results. Additionally, those navigation elements may be used for internal linking and the accessibility of the page is guaranteed.
A company whose site uses parallax scrolling might gain from establishing a blog and posting to it regularly. Site visitors can still be “amazed” by the parallax website and the blog will attract traffic from the leading search engines.

Tags: affect, design, parallax, SEO, web