The Fancy Page Works. Your Visitor Pays for It.

Last month we built the most elaborate page we have ever made. You scroll, and a film plays with you, forwards as you go down and backwards as you come up. I am glad we made it. Now the bill, because that is the useful half. The page weighs 64 megabytes. Fifty of those are video. We do not pay that. The visitor does, on their data, standing in a queue somewhere.

The fancy part was not the expensive part

Here is what surprised me. The whole thing is about a thousand lines of ordinary JavaScript. No framework, no library, nothing bought in. The effect was cheap to build. The pictures are expensive to deliver. Two different budgets, and people mix them up when they price a moving website.

On phones we dropped the video, not the animation

Scrubbing video is hard on an iPhone. Apple limits how much a page may decode, so the clever method stutters exactly where most of your traffic is. So on phones there is no video at all. The animation is the same and still moves with your scroll, only now each scene is 64 still pictures painted one after another instead of a film wound back and forth. The plain thing beat the clever thing, which happens more than agencies admit.

One more, if you want to be found: turn JavaScript off and there is nothing on that page but the title. Fine for a showreel. Fatal for a page you need found.

So when is it worth it

My rule, after paying for the lesson: an effect earns its keep when it shows something words cannot. Our film has to show a process. That is a job. A logo sliding in from the left is not doing a job. It is a tax your visitor pays in seconds.

Your one job this week

Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data, not wifi. Count the seconds until you can read the first sentence. Then look at anything that moves and ask what it is explaining. If the answer is nothing, that is this week’s job.

The week in brief

• Google rankings went haywire the week of 24 July and Google still has not named an update. If your traffic dropped and you cannot see why, wait before rebuilding anything.
• Search Console can now show how your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube content performs inside Google. Live worldwide on 29 July, free, and quick to claim.
• Google is testing AI-written descriptions on Shopping ads. Spotted by Brodie Clark, not announced. If you sell products, the words under them may soon not be yours.
• From 31 August, Shopping campaigns show local stock by default and you cannot switch it off the old way. Only matters if you run a local stock feed. Check yours.