33.4% of Websites Still Load Homepage Slider Code vs 19.6% of the Most Visited Sites

A visitor lands on a roofing company's homepage. A large photo of a new roof fades into a photo of a gutter, then a coupon, then a team picture, each for five seconds. By the time the slide with the phone number comes around, she has already scrolled down looking for it, or left.

Rotating homepage sliders, also called carousels, were a design staple for a decade. Usability researchers have long argued that few visitors click past the first slide, that auto-rotating messages are easy to miss, and that the extra code and large images slow the page down. For a small business, a slider often means several big images loading before the visitor sees one clear message.

The web has not let them go. 33.4% of website homepages load a slider or carousel library, one in three. The most visited websites have moved on faster: 19.6% of the top 10,000 load one.

We used the September 2026 HTTP Archive, a public dataset that tests millions of websites every month and records the technologies installed on each homepage. We counted the 15,470,478 homepages loading any of 16 slider and carousel libraries and plugins, including Swiper, Slick, OWL Carousel, Slider Revolution, Flickity, Splide, Smart Slider 3, MetaSlider and FlexSlider.

A slider library is the code that makes images or panels rotate or swipe across the page. We broke the total down by library and compared the 10,000 most visited websites, ranked by Google's Chrome UX Report, with all homepages.

That is 5,165,233 homepages. Swiper is the most common by a wide margin, on 18.2% of homepages. It is a modern, touch-friendly library used for banners, product galleries, testimonial rows and swipeable panels on phones.

The older libraries show how many homepages still carry the classic banner slider. Slick, OWL Carousel, Slider Revolution, FlexSlider and similar tools were built mainly for rotating banners, and leaving Swiper out, slider libraries still load on 18.9% of homepages, nearly one in five.

That is well below the 33.4% of all homepages. Many of the biggest websites have replaced the rotating banner with a single, static message and one clear button. One likely reason for the gap is that smaller websites more often still run the template they launched with, slider included.

WordPress plugins make up much of the slider count on smaller websites. Slider Revolution runs on 560,702 homepages, 3.6% of the web, and with Smart Slider 3, MetaSlider and Master Slider, WordPress slider plugins run on more than 740,000 homepages.

Slick and OWL Carousel together load on about 2 million homepages. Splide, Glide.js and Tiny Slider have a much smaller footprint, at 1.1%, 0.3% and 0.2% of homepages. If a site needs a carousel at all, the choice of library affects how much code every visitor downloads before the page is ready to use.

If your homepage opens with a rotating slider, check your analytics or a heatmap before keeping it: see how many visitors click anything after the first slide. Pick the one message that matters most and give it a single, static hero with one clear button, such as "Get a free quote". Move the other slides into sections further down the page.

If you keep a carousel for a product gallery or reviews, make sure it does not rotate on its own, has visible controls and loads its images only as they come into view, which keeps the page fast and usable with a keyboard and a screen reader. Website redesign services usually start here, because the top of the homepage is where most visitors decide whether to stay.

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