When building a website, it’s easy to be drawn to visual flair, including hover animations, scroll-triggered parallax effects, loading transitions, and other “wow” features. They look great in demos, and there’s no denying that eye-catching design can make a strong first impression.
While the Total theme does offer some of this, we generally take a different approach. The mail goal is to give users a theme that is lightweight, fast, accessible, and SEO-friendly by default. In real-world use, these factors often matter more than fancy effects.
Let’s take a moment to explain why.
Animations Often Sacrifice Accessibility and Usability
For example, a common animation technique is to split text into individual letters or words to animate them separately. While visually impressive, this can be problematic for screen readers, which may read out the letters individually instead of interpreting them as a word or phrase. Fixing this requires adding extra ARIA labels and hiding inner content from assistive tech — which introduces unnecessary complexity and potential for mistakes.
In Total, we avoid these patterns by default to ensure your site works well for all visitors, including those using assistive technologies.
JavaScript-Heavy Effects Hurt Performance
Many flashy effects require JavaScript that listens for scroll or hover events. This adds to your site’s overall JavaScript load, which can:
- Slow down page load and render times
- Hurt Core Web Vitals scores
- Create jank or delay on mobile devices
- Break if third-party scripts fail
By keeping Total lean and minimizing JavaScript use, your site loads faster, performs better on mobile, and delivers a smoother experience across the board.
Parallax Effects Are Glitchy and Often Inconsistent
Parallax scrolling may look nice on desktop, but it tends to misbehave on mobile — causing layout issues, stuttering, or even crashes on lower-end devices. Some themes disable parallax on mobile for this reason, which can make your design feel inconsistent across screen sizes.
While newer CSS-based scroll animations are in development (and very promising), they are currently only supported in Chrome and Edge. Until modern CSS-based solutions become widely supported, we avoid bundling advanced parallax features that depend on JavaScript workarounds.
SEO and Clean Markup Shouldn’t Be Sacrificed
Search engines rely on semantic HTML and fast-loading content. Adding heavy animations, hidden content layers, or custom DOM manipulations can confuse crawlers, slow down indexing, or even negatively affect rankings.
We believe in keeping markup as clean and straightforward as possible, which benefits SEO and helps developers understand and customize their sites more easily.
Lightweight Design = Better Long-Term Results
When clients request flashy features, it’s often because they’re comparing theme demos rather than thinking about real-world results. But once the site is launched, clients start caring about:
- Speed scores and Core Web Vitals
- Search visibility
- Mobile usability
- Ease of maintenance
Flashy features are fun until they start affecting business metrics. That’s why we believe it’s smarter to start with a strong performance foundation and add custom visual effects only where needed — ideally in a clean, modular way that doesn’t affect the entire site.
Flexibility Without Bloat
We’re not opposed to animations entirely — in fact, Total does include some animations (hover styles, image overlays, card hover effects, sliders, carousels, etc). But we do try and keep these to a bare minimal and some of these features have been added due to a high demand while at the same time not necessarily recommend. Have a look at our take on carousels, for example.
If you do want something more elaborate, we’re happy to help you implement it. We often provide snippets or guidance to customers so they can add specific effects to their site without sacrificing performance for everyone else using the theme.
Conclusion: A Smarter Design Philosophy
At the end of the day, Total is built for those who value long-term success, clean code, and a strong user experience, not just surface-level flashiness or what’s currently considered “modern”. Ironically, many of those flashy animations often feel more outdated than modern, as more websites today are shifting toward clean, flat designs that prioritize speed and usability.
By prioritizing speed, accessibility, and SEO, we aim to help users build websites that load quickly, perform well on all devices, and reach a wider audience. At the same time, Total gives you the flexibility to add refined design touches in a way that is clean, efficient, and built to last.