What belongs in a footer

Who reaches the footer

Somebody who read to the end of a page and either wants to act or did not find what they needed. Both of those are valuable, and both are served by a footer that is actually useful.

It is also where people look for the boring essentials: terms, privacy, an address, a company number. Those have a conventional home and visitors expect to find them there.

So a footer has two jobs. Catch the reader who finished, and hold the references that do not belong in the main menu. Everything else in it is decoration.

The essentials

A contact route, so somebody ready to act does not have to scroll back. Hours and service area if they are short. And the legal pages, which many jurisdictions and most platforms expect.

Terms, privacy and an accessibility statement are the usual three. Our page on the compliance checklist covers what your trade may require beyond them.

Where your business type requires a registration number or a regulatory notice, the footer is where it conventionally goes and where anybody looking will check first.

Secondary navigation

Everything that did not fit in the main menu. Secondary services, the sitemap, careers, press, and any page a small number of people need reliably.

That relationship is what keeps the main menu short. Our page on navigation menus covers the five to seven items that belong up top, with the rest landing here.

Group them under short headings rather than listing forty links in one block. A grouped footer is scannable; an ungrouped one is a wall nobody reads.

What a footer should hold

The list below is a footer that earns its space. It fits on one screen on a phone, which is the constraint most footers fail.

• A contact route and the hours
• Terms, privacy and accessibility
• Any registration or regulatory notice your trade requires
• Secondary pages, grouped under short headings
• A link to the sitemap
• The service area, if it is short
• A copyright line with the current year

What does not belong

Every page on the site. A footer duplicating a hundred links helps nobody, and a block of links repeated on every page says nothing about any individual page to a reader or to an answer engine.

Keyword lists dressed as navigation. Towns and services listed purely to be crawled is an old pattern that is recognized and does not help, and our page on doorway pages covers the family it belongs to.

And an email address in plain text, which is collected automatically. We route contact through a form on every site we build for exactly that reason.

Structure and headings

Use real headings for footer groups rather than styled text, and keep the levels in order with the rest of the page. A heading level jumped in the footer breaks the outline of every page on the site.

That is a mistake we made ourselves on this site, on every page, and it was invisible until a structural check reported it. Our page on heading structure covers why it matters.

Mark the footer as a footer in the markup. It costs nothing and it lets somebody using a screen reader skip past it, which is what that region exists for.

Keeping it current

The copyright year, the hours, the address and any registration detail. Footers are updated less often than any other part of a site, because nobody reads their own footer.

Automate the year if your tool allows it. A footer still showing a year that is two years past is a small signal of neglect on every page at once.

Check the links occasionally. A dead terms page in the footer is a dead link on every page of the site, which is the one place a broken link does the most damage.