When designing a website for your small business or company, there are many different elements to consider. You have to select the color scheme, fonts, navigational buttons, graphics, and decide whether or not to add music. In order to capture a web user’s attention, you want to ensure that your landing page is easy on the eyes and the ears. There are some real drawbacks to adding auto-playing music to your site.

Can Create Confusion

When visitors land on your site, they are seeking information. The last thing that you would want to do is bombard them with too much and overwhelm them with sounds and graphics. By having music auto-playing on your site, you may startle or confuse visitors. Many web users are browsing the web from their workplace, so they may not appreciate having sound come blaring out of their speakers when they are in their office. Their co-workers are not likely to appreciate it, either.

Many people simply find music on websites annoying because they have headphones on and are listing to their personal music selections. This can leave them scrambling to find the volume controls and turn off the noise. At worst, they will just click out of your site in an effort to stop the sound quickly. Some web users see websites with auto-playing music as disregarding them altogether because of the inconvenience it can create.

Musical Tastes

Every person has their own preferences when it comes to music styles, artists and songs. By setting music to auto-play, you are sending the reader a message about your musical preferences. Individuals could enjoy the music choice, but at the same time, your musical taste could differ drastically from theirs, and be an instant turn-off.

Music has the ability to create a reaction within people, so it could really go either way. Visitors may connect with your song or style choice, or they may not. The possibility of making a connection with some visitors does not outweigh the potential of turning off hundreds of others and having them click away from your site, never to return, based off of a bad first impression. If you are running a business website, you want to remember that every visitor is a potential customer, so you have to focus on making a positive first impression.

Space and Bandwidth

Perhaps the biggest reason not to include music on a site is because multimedia files hog space. You will need more bandwidth from your web host in order to support audio and video files. This may bump up your monthly or annual hosting fees. You need to decide if it is worth it enough to include multimedia to justify the additional cost. For small businesses, this may be one expense that is unnecessary.

Know Your Audience

It is so important to know your audience and keep them in mind at all times when creating your site design. If you are a musician, or if music is an integral part of your business, readers may not be surprised to hear something when your website loads. In this instance, it may be understandable to include an audio player that users can control by themselves. This can offer a taste of your music to potential customers without forcing it upon them.

You can choose to install an audio player that readers can control by turning the volume up or down and stopping the music altogether. Since you likely want your website to appeal to the majority of web users, you must keep your audience in mind. If your business is not directly musically related, it would be best to forgo the music and focus on the content of your site.

Author Bio: Joshua Turner is a writer who creates informative articles in relation to business. In this article he explains some pros and cons of using music on a website and aims to encourage further study with an online masters degree of music education.