Web designers are always looking for new and creative ways to make websites more appealing, attractive and engaging. There are many ways to do it and using rich media con…
Web designers are always looking for new and creative ways to make websites more appealing, attractive and engaging. There are many ways to do it and using rich media content is just one of them. Videos, animations, audio clips, etc. are examples of rich media content on websites. You must have visited websites with this type of content on them in your internet navigation experience. Of course, they add some value to the website, but only when they are used minimally. Using too much of rich media can has its disadvantages. Here are some reasons why you should keep rich media content to a minimum on your website.
It Makes Websites Slow to Load
The biggest disadvantage of rich media content on the website is how heavy it makes the web pages. The more rich media content you have on your website the more weight your website will have. Due to the increased size of the website it will take more bandwidth to load the website. As time for your website to load increases, the website visitors start abandoning your website. There are people who would abandon a website if it does not load within 1 to 3 seconds. With rich media content on your website, it is near to impossible for the website to load within that time.
You also have to think about the geographical location of your target audience. If a large part of your target audience lives in countries where internet speeds aren’t that great, you would want to keep very little of the rich media content on the website or completely do away with it. In some regions of the world, your website might take even up to 30 seconds to load.
It Increases Website’s Dependencies
When there is rich media on your website, it needs to be supported by the browsers being used by your target audience. Different people have different browsers and for the bandwidth purposes, many users have various scripts blocked on their browsers. What this means is that your rich media will not even load completely on their browsers and make your website look very unsightly.
Take the example of Java content and how users accept Java content on their browsers. There are tutorials over tutorials available on the internet helping people disable Java plugins on their browsers. So, if your media content on the website is made of Java, it will not work on the browsers with Java plugin disabled. You also have to think about mobile users. Many smartphone users will not be able to see your rich media content properly as their browsers don’t fully support it.
It Is Not Good for SEO
Another big reason why so many websites avoid rich media content is because this type of content is not the best for search engine optimization. When you put a video on your website, the search engine crawlers cannot listen to or watch its content.
You have to make crawlers index this content by either including certain keywords when creating a reference for the video in the website code or transcribing the video. But writing a huge transcription of the video on the website is not as easy as it sounds. It takes up space and even kills the purpose of having the video on the website in the first place.
It is like your content is fighting with itself. If you have put a video on the website, you want your users to watch the video but with the transcription, you are getting their attention to the written script. Java content also does not contribute to your website’s SEO ranking.