How To Optimise Your Website With Animations

Does you website have all the bells-and-whistles? That was the question a couple of moons back...
And do you remember how tired and frustrated you would get waiting for them to load in?
Every website was about the dancing. Full with annoying graphics and sounds moving from all directions.

Ohh, those were the days…
Did it make for a better user experience? We thought it did… at the time.

Would we do it today?  Most definitely not!

Since businesses realized the importance of their online presence, so have designers and developers. Gone are the days where designers would force their wacky ideas onto the developers, who very happily ‘translate’ them into code.

In all honestly, most of them were really impressive and in line with the trends of the day although it wouldn’t work due to browsers restrictions.

A virtual marriage made in heaven since the ideas bounced from one to the other with the user and client out of the equation.

On those days everything was game.

Then the industry grew and realized it needed to create and standardize some rules and bring the user to the limelight.
And UX became the question to answer. With user’s expectations to take into consideration and businesses embracing the vast possibilities of the benefits of their online presence pushed designers and developers to work together to help those businesses to achieve their goals. Common sense really...

1. you are on business only if you have a client
2. you have a client if you do what they want you to do
3. but…you need to listen to the client and observe the end-user

Nowadays, there are still many websites that don’t follow the rules. Design wise they are outstanding, but from the user’s point of…use…they don’t really work.

See it closer

So, how do you incorporate animation to UX functionality?

When developing a new project there are some points to consider to implement animation without going OTT:

1. Think of engaging users, keep them on the page by explaining any changes, use new technology to transmit up-to-date brand.
2. Plan where, what and why.  Your animations should be in the right place to make sure the users see them at the right time. Let users see the content, bring attention to their actions to guide them to your goals.
3. Don’t let users get lost. Focus on your navigation, keep it simple and always show the users where they are and/or how did they get there.
4. Predict their interactions to make them feel you’re listening. It’s important to provide the user with the appropriate immediate feedback (show & tell) to reassure them their action was right (reducing uncertainty and increasing happiness), like colour-button changes or progress indicators.

Once you've analysed your audience you'll be ready to implement some animation.

Our Key Points

Whether you are developing a project or getting to know your website, there are two points to keep in mind to help you optimise your website to the full:

– Functionality – achievable by giving your users the right tools to use your website.  This will help them to identify your website’ features, release your website’s potential and enhance the user’s experience. Pay attention when designing shopping carts, forms and email links.

– Optimise– by adding options to the users experience you will increase their time on your website, giving them a positive impression and time to accomplish their tasks. All these will be reflected on your analytics’ numbers. 

Here's a short example of why should you consider paying attention to your UX to help your website optimisation and subsequently, climb up on the search engine ranks.

We love videos, animation, calls-to-action, maps, forms, visual design, social media…everything helps, and adding functionality to a website will improve its position on search engines…if done right of course.


As web designers and developers we will love to help and advise on technical factors that can affect your rankings.

Let Local SEO Edinburgh build an effective online marketing campaigns that effectively target the right customers.