A smaller screen size means longer scrolling.

That reality gives explanation to the 2015 statistics – mobile browsing overtaking desktop browsing. The popularity of small screens have inspired designers to rethink the above the fold placement.

Long Scrolling – Why It’s Trending

If you think people don’t read below the fold, think again. Chartbeat; a data analytic provider, collected data from two billion visits and found that 66 percent of user time was spent below the fold, not above.

Twitter remains among the most recognized long scrolling websites today. As you scroll through your Twitter timeline, new tweets are seamlessly presented in chronological order.

As with most things in life, long scrolling web design has its drawbacks. It is always recommended that you do research to ensure whether a web trend or other technologies are in line with the goals of your small business website.

Without further ado, here is the quick rundown of the pros for the long scrolling trend:

Pros

Visual Effects – Using long scrolling, you don’t have to focus totally on divided content blocks. Your design can be something continual to engage users that will make them scroll down – giving them an exciting and fresh experience.

Storytelling – Long scrolling web design offers designers exciting opportunities such as storytelling, using visually appealing images and animations.

Engaging and Modern – The long scrolling is a modern web design technique which is all about scrolling rather than clicking. It’s more personalized for smart device users. It steps away from complex navigation and step towards a unique, simpler and more user-friendly experience.

Result Driven – Scrolling is an intuitive action, whereas clicking to another page, the user needs to be highly motivated to click through.

Like all web design trends and techniques, long scrolling does have its own unique drawbacks.

Cons

Slows Page Loading – Many site owners avoid long-scrolling due to its performance issues. Well, any design with lots of videos or imagery can slow the website speed, especially if it is a parallax-scrolling website because it mostly relies on jQuery and JavaScript.

Navigation – Since there is no back button available, users have to scroll back each time which can get pretty frustrating. An ideal solution to overcome this problem is to create a sticky top navigation which means users won’t have to keep scrolling back up to access previously viewed content.

Not SEO Friendly – When you reduce the number of pages, you are probably giving Google and other search engines less pages to index, thus less chance to rank well for different keywords. However, this can be become.

If you’re interested in a long scrolling (infinite scrolling) web design, we’d love to help. Click here for a free consult.

Hazel Burgess

Hazel Burgess
FOUNDER/SEO DIRECTOR

Hazel is the Founder & SEO Director at Envisager Studio, a premier website design agency specializing in WordPress website design, development and internet marketing. In her spare time, she writes about search engine optimization, website design, and internet marketing.