Animation in UX Design: Elevating User Experience and SEO

Are website animations only eye candy, or do they have any other purpose? 

Let’s get into how these moving elements can enhance usability and increase your site's SEO performance.

The role of animations in web design 

What are web animations?

Web animations are dynamic elements of a website that enhance the overall interaction and increase its usability. Picture them as the delicate tool that leads you around a site while you haven’t even registered its existence. 

There are loading animations (spinners or skeleton screens), micro-interactions (like button hover effects or form validation cues that give immediate feedback), scroll-triggered animations (fade-in, parallax effects), and Lottie animations, which are lightweight JSON-based animations that can be scaled and interactive.

Why websites use animations

Animations are an important part of visual storytelling. When it comes to communications, they deliver brand messages more effectively and transform content to be memorable and engaging. 

As a result, user attention is guided by key actions, such as highlighting the call to action (CTA) buttons to route users on what to click next. Animations improve interactivity, while websites become more dynamic, and users are encouraged to explore and interact with their content.

How animations improve User Experience (UX)

It’s important to use these thoughtful animations to establish a better user journey—one that is fun, intuitive, and engaging. That’s why the following four aspects improve UX and pave the way for better SEO performance.

Enhancing engagement & interactivity

Animations can help understand interaction because they reduce cognitive load, like hover states that make a button pop bigger when you hover over it. With that, the user knows it’s clickable, as animation provides immediate feedback to the user.

Guiding user attention

Motion naturally draws the eye. A rapidly pulsing “Sign Up” button could draw a user’s attention and effectively lead to the desired action.

Reducing Perceived Load Time 

No one likes waiting. Skeuomorphs such as skeleton screens—which mimic the contents about to be loaded—can shorten wait times and keep users engaged. For example, on Facebook, skeleton loaders are employed to enhance the user perception when fetching data.

Source: Shopify

Creating a seamless navigation experience

No one perceives jarring pages or section jumps as a sign of authoritativeness and quality. So, animated transitions between pages or sections have to be smooth. In this case, users don’t have sharp jumps and, as a result, your website receives greater overall satisfaction.

SEO benefits & challenges of animations 

Adding animations to your site positively impacts user engagement and SEO. When executed thoughtfully, animations improve user experience and could improve SEO metrics. On the other hand, when animations are not implemented properly, they can retard site performance and search rankings. Let’s plunge into what makes and what breaks your SEO in terms of animations.

Top 3 SEO benefits of well-optimised animations

• Lower Bounce Rate. Visitors are often attracted by an engaging interface animation, which make them stay on your site longer and learn more. This is great for improving your site’s behavioral factors—a low bounce rate is one of the signs that your content is relevant and useful. 
• Improved Dwell Time. Well-animated websites can also improve on other user experience factors that search engines take into consideration, like dwell time. Interactive and dynamic content animations let the user spend more time on your pages. With that, search engines believe your content interests the reader, providing rankings a potential boost. This way, 82% of marketers say video has caused more time spent on their website.
• Mobile-Friendly & Responsive Animations. Animations have to be lightweight and load efficiently on mobile devices, which is why using formats such as Lottie is wise. Because search engines tend to prioritize mobile-friendly sites in their rankings, this is something to pay attention to. Just like lightweight animations, you can also use them to increase performance and provide a better user experience across devices, which are also good for SEO.

Source: Youtube

Top 3 SEO challenges of poorly implemented animations

• Page Load Speed Issues. Heavy or unoptimized animations can slow down a website’s loading time drastically, which can also damage Core Web Vitals (CWV). This set of user experience metrics is used by Google to evaluate page performance, so it directly impacts your ranking positions. Having slow load times will lead to a higher bounce rate and lower search rankings. Many times, embedded videos and complex animations, like a GIF, can take a second or a couple of seconds to render a page.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Problems. Layout shifts caused by animations signal that your user experience needs improvement. Seek visual stability since users are frustrated by unexpected content shifts. For example, if you have big banner animation loading after the main content, its appearance may push down other elements, bumping down reading points for users. Such issues can hurt your search rankings and the technical UX score of your site. It is always good to prevent unexpected layout shifts to achieve a good CLS score.
• Crawling & Indexability Concerns. JavaScript-based animations bring plenty of elements to enrich the site. Still, animated JavaScript elements often create problems for search engine bots to crawl and index your content effectively. Heavy use of JavaScript may cause search engines to struggle to render the pages, so they may not be able to index the entire page and run into ranking issues. 

To detect all these issues, you should regularly run website audits with specialized tools, especially after considerable changes to your site. Tools like the SE Ranking Website Audit will identify crawling and indexability errors, evaluate CWV, and detect many other issues that impact website performance. Besides, it provides recommendations on how to fix them. This constant effort contributes to a seamless user search experience and higher rankings.

Best practices for animation optimisation 

Website animations significantly increase user engagement and experience. Properly implemented animations can bring a complete refreshment to user engagement on a site and can aid a worthy cause to good UX SEO efforts. 

Below, we discuss what type of animation you will be the best fit to ensure your website’s improvement. 

Performance optimisation strategies

• Use Lightweight Formats. For your animations to be lightweight, go for file formats that allow for quick download and are not too large. Some SEOs recommend using PNG for images and GIF instead of MP4 for videos since they generally require less space and enable smooth download. The general rule is as follows:​​
  • WebP is best for speed and compression. 
  • PNG is best for lossless quality and transparency. 
  • JPG is best for compatibility.
    
    You can also use code to replace some of your videos. For example, Lottie animations are vectors, making them lighter than GIFs. Such formats guarantee the quick loading of animations while not compromising their quality.

Source: Noun Project

• Lazy Load Animations. Implement a lazy loading technique to ensure that animations only load when they come in view. The results of this approach reduce initial page load time as well as conserve some bandwidth, resulting in a better overall site performance. This is done by deferring animations loading until the last moment when they need to be played, which means faster page renders for users.
• Compress Animation Files. Keeping animation file size to a minimum is critical to optimal web performance. This can be done by cropping unnecessary white space, resizing dimensions, and limiting colors to a few options. On animated GIFs, tinting the frames down can also reduce file size. Export your animations using image editing software for faster downloads and better user experience.

SEO-friendly implementation

• Minimize JavaScript Dependencies. Depending upon your case, overusage of JavaScript for animations may cause page load time to slow. In some cases, it can negatively affect your SEO. If possible, use performance-friendly CSS animations and less resource intensive. This option also improves the loading speed and compatibility with different devices and different browsers.
• Use CSS & SVG Animations. For simple animations, CSS and SVG offer efficient and scalable solutions. These technologies allow for smooth animation with no overheads of JavaScript and better performance and speed on the web. Another thing is that SVG animations are resolution-independent and remain perfectly sharp on all screen sizes.
• Prioritize Mobile Optimization. Since a considerable part of users access websites on mobile devices, consider a UX optimization for a different screen sizes and performance. Test the animations on other devices to check whether they are rendered properly. Appropriate animation adaption should be applied using responsive design principles.

Ensuring accessibility compliance

Accessibility matters. Building your website the way that prioritizes inclusion is must nowadays. Consider including descriptive alternative text or Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) attributes to make animations accessible to all users, including those utilizing assistive technologies. This is a good practice, which allows users who cannot perceive visual content to understand its purpose and context. 

Not-so-effective animations may be irritating to some users or make them feel disoriented. As for individuals with motion sensitivities, don’t forget to suggest them the option of disabling such effects to make their browsing experience more comfortable. Your commitment to accessibility can be demostrated by implementing a simple toggle or by adjusting to users’ reduced motion preferences that they have set in their operating systems.

Summary

Creating a dynamic, inclusive UX can be done by optimizing performance, adopting SEO-friendly practices, and building accessible experiences. Combining visual attractiveness with functionality also pleases users while in sync with the search engine’s rules, which will help improve your website's visibility and performance.

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