Should I Have Background Music on My Website?

Listen to the funky beat.  Hear that lovely jingle. Imagine your customer tapping a foot as they browse your homepage.

It was trendy and cool in the ’90s. Music on a web page? Wow!  I made something interactive!

A lot has happened since then.

The average Internet user is a different person many years later.

We have been around the block, and that block was riddled with a lot of noisy web pages.  And yet, I still see templates available online with flashy animations and sound effects.  And some business owners who have not experienced a web development project before may think the sound is a nifty way to make their website unique.

Before you think adding music to your website is a great idea, consider a few things.

The environment where the visitor will be viewing the website.

Some customers research products and services at work.  Especially if your service is business-to-business and they are researching for on their company’s behalf.  Background noise or music can be disruptive to that company’s environment and might even get someone in trouble.  Their first reaction might be to quickly close the website and move on.

The ability to hear the sound.

Many users don’t have working speakers or they keep their computer sound muted.  If you consider the sound effects in your site to be important and put a lot of development effort into them, they may still go unnoticed by a large chunk of your audience.

Your industry.

There are some industries that naturally go well with music.  The entertainment industry is the best example, which may include an actual music group, or even a nightclub or production company.  In these cases, people visiting those sites are expecting a certain type of content and they are much less likely to be shocked by hearing sounds.  If they are seeking out information about music, they are likely to have the technical support to listen to it.

But in an unrelated business environment, music or unique sound effects may be viewed in a negative manner.  They could be considered immature or out of place with your audience.

Quality website performance.

Music and things like menu and button sound effects can cause slower loading times for web pages.  If you have a large clip of music playing on your homepage, it needs to pre-load before anyone can hear it.  That music clip might need to finish downloading completely before the rest of your web page can display.  If this adds even a few seconds to your website loading experience, it definitely affects your visitors’ perception of you. In many cases, they will give up and quickly leave.

But what about video?

These points about sound should still be considered, but video is a little different.  Video usually requires an action from the user to play it.  This is assuming it is not set up to auto-play, which I do often discourage.  If the video does auto-play, the user has control to pause and stop it, which makes the experience less threatening.  A good video by a professional production company can really tell a story or make a selling point quickly, and people like that. People have less patience for reading than video, so they are more welcoming of it.  Music and background sounds don’t really tell a story or sell a product (unless you are selling the music).