Website easter eggs: what they are, and why you should have some
Whatever your preferred type — chocolate, cheese, hot cross bun infused, shaped like an aubergine — Easter eggs are for life, not just for Easter. This is for 2 reasons: 1. delicious food should be enjoyed all year round if you want it, but also 2. because you can get website easter eggs too.
What are website easter eggs?
No, they’ve not invented lickable websites (…yet. Why are we f’ing around with AI when we could be getting on with the hard-hitting stuff???). Easter eggs are hidden messages, images, or features in something, usually electronic, that are designed to reward fans. You may have noticed them in games you’ve played — the concept of Easter eggs started out with Atari in 1979 — or in films and franchises you follow (and look, if it’s good enough for Marvel…)
You can even get them on voice assistants like Alexa and Google, when you ask them to do certain things. But when we’re talking about the ones you encounter online, we’re talking website Easter eggs.
What’s the point of website Easter eggs?
Joyfully, the point of website Easter eggs is everything and nothing at the same time. At their simplest, Easter eggs are additions to your website that add delight to your customer's experience and personality to your business. So, in other words: they’re a bit of fun. For me, that’s reason enough!
However, in addition, they can help increase your site traffic, increase the time visitors spend on your site and therefore increase their engagement with it, as well as improving the awareness of your brand.
Some ideas for website Easter eggs that don’t require code
Impact+ describes website Easter eggs as “jokes, features, or messages hidden by programmers, designers, or developers in the websites and software they build”, but you don’t have to be fluent in a coding language to add them.
Here’s a couple of easy ways to add website Easter eggs:
In your microcopy
As the name suggests, microcopy is the tiny bits of text that abound on our website (Susan Reoch calls them the “little roadsigns of the digital universe”, which I love.) You know the ones: your button text, your banners, your confirmation messages, etc. These are all prime places for some website easter egg action, like this one from Mailchimp:
via LittleBigDetails
In your images
Another prime place for website Easter eggs is in your images. Where can you slip in a reference for only the eager-est of eyes? (Hands up who thought it was eagle eyes in Mr Brightside?)
Where you might have expected a few squiggles, the TextEdit app icon on Mac used to have a full poem written on it. And not just any poem, either, but one that was part of an iconic Apple ad campaign back in the 90s: Think Different, narrated by Steve Jobs.
Your Error 404 page
In an ideal world, no-one will ever see this page — but it’s good to cover for the eventuality if they do. Alongside being useful, of course, your Error 404 page is an ideal place for website Easter eggs. The team at KonMari have got a really tongue in cheek message which makes me giggle; it says “We’ve been tidying up — and we let go of this page with gratitude.”
(Fancy spicing up your Error 404 page? You can grab my guide to maximising it for just £9 on the shop, or on the right there.)
Your cursor
OK I LIED, I’M SORRY - this one requires a tiny bit of coding. But it’s too fun to not include!
Harking back to Piczo and MySpace sites of yore, why not create a custom cursor for your site? Think of an icon that represents your business, that is simple enough to work on miniscule scale. Even better, choose something dynamic for when it’s hovering over a link. I love love love what The Ede Store have done with theirs: a dropper that fills up with liquid when you’re on a link. It’s genius!
It fills! With liquid! So clever! via The Ede Store
So, hopefully that’s got some creative juices flowing for website easter egg ideas. Don’t forget to show me them when you do them — I’d love to see!
