Have you gone to a website and had music auto play and blast your speakers nearly knocking you out of your seat and wanting you to run away as fast as possible?

Unfortunately it’s happened to all of us before! The website owner thinks they’re sharing a cool, groovy tune that their visitors will enjoy while browsing their website. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Music tastes are so varied, and what one person likes is very rarely what another person likes to listen to.

Mixing up the idea that your website would be better with music is something that can really have a detriment on your overall traffic and success of the website itself. You might have a gorgeous looking website, but when you put an auto play music track on it you can send people off of it who would have otherwise really enjoyed it.

That’s not to say that music cannot be on websites, this is specifically referring to auto play when a visitor lands on the website the music starts playing automatically. This is a really bad idea, instead if you want to share a track with your visitors, put it in a audio player and allow them to turn it on or turn it off at will. WordPress has an audio feature for embedding tracks as well as HTML5 has a native audio element < audio > for putting in tracks.

This is a much more user-friendly approach and can allow the visitor to choose whether they want to listen to your tracks or not. Even music artists do not do auto play and that should give you a good idea of whether this is a good technique or not.

Have you ever been to a music artist website and their latest track plays automatically? No? Okay so that’s a good indication that it’s a bad idea to have auto play music on your website. Not only does it blast away people who have their speakers up 100% but it can also slow down the website performance and the load time on the website as well.

Avoid all this by putting in an audio player instead and allow the visitor to decide whether they want to add sound to the experience or not, because most of them usually do not want to have music playing at the same time they’re trying to read a website.