A skip link is the first thing on a page, and it jumps a keyboard reader past your menu. Without one they tab through the whole header before reaching a word of content. Every page. Every time.
Short answer
A skip to content link is the first thing on a page. It jumps a reader past the header and navigation, straight to the main content. Keyboard and screen reader users meet your menu on every page otherwise. It is usually hidden until it receives focus, which is why most site owners have never seen their own.
Your header is the same on every page. A logo, eight menu items, maybe a phone link and a search box. A sighted visitor ignores all of it in a fraction of a second.
A keyboard reader cannot ignore it. They tab through every one of those controls before arriving at the first paragraph, and they do it again on the next page, and the next.
Across a visit of half a dozen pages that is a hundred keystrokes spent on navigation the reader already knows. A skip link turns the whole thing into one.
The cost compounds across a visit. Six pages with a ten-item header is sixty keystrokes spent on navigation somebody already read, before a word of what they came for.
Most skip links are styled to sit off screen until they receive focus, then appear at the top of the page. That keeps the design clean while the feature stays available.
The side effect is that nobody who uses a mouse ever encounters it. Site owners are frequently surprised to learn they have one, and equally surprised to learn theirs has been broken for a year.
Load your homepage and press the tab key once. Something should become visible. If nothing does, either there is no skip link or its focus styling was removed.
It has one job. Move focus to the start of the main content, so the next tab lands on the first real link or field inside the page rather than back in the header.
A common half implementation scrolls the page without moving focus. The screen changes and the keyboard position does not, so the next keystroke sends the reader back into the menu.
Test it properly. Press tab, press enter, then press tab again and see where you land. That third keystroke is the one that tells you the truth.
First. Before the logo, before anything. If a reader has to tab past three controls to reach the link that saves them tabbing, the saving has already gone.
One link is usually enough on a business site. Larger sites sometimes offer a second to jump to the navigation itself, which helps a reader who wants the menu deliberately.
Keep the wording plain. Skip to main content is understood everywhere. Clever wording here helps nobody and confuses people arriving from another site.
This gets filed under screen reader support, and the larger group is people who use a keyboard for physical reasons. Limited hand movement, tremors, pain, a temporary injury.
For them each keystroke has a cost. A hundred unnecessary ones across a visit is not an inconvenience, it is the reason they go somewhere else.
There is also a small group who simply navigate faster by keyboard than by pointer, and they will notice immediately whether your site respects their time.
Voice control users are in the same position. Somebody driving an interface by speech is issuing a command per stop, and a header they have to speak their way through is the same tax in a different currency.
Load the homepage fresh, without clicking anything, and press tab. Then repeat on a deep page, because some builders only place the link on templates it was tested against.
Confirm it is visible when focused, that the wording is legible against whatever sits behind it, and that enter actually moves the keyboard position.
Every page written by Website Builder Studio carries one, and each page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.
If the link is there but focus does not move, you have the common half-implementation: the page scrolls and the keyboard position stays in the header. The third keystroke is what reveals it.
A skip link is a shortcut past a problem, not a solution to it. A menu with thirty items in four nested layers is still hard to operate once somebody actually wants the menu.
It also does nothing for the reader who is looking for a specific page rather than the content of this one. That is a structure question, not a shortcut question.
None of this is legal advice. Treat the skip link as the cheapest good manners available, then look at whether the navigation behind it is genuinely useful.
A menu with thirty items in four nested layers is still hard to operate once somebody actually wants the menu, which is the subject of accessible navigation menus.
Yes, because a reader can arrive on any page directly from search. A skip link on the homepage alone helps only the visitors who came through the front door.
It can, and some sites do. Hiding it until focus is more common for design reasons, but a permanently visible link is never wrong and is easier to verify.
Then the benefit is small, and the link costs almost nothing to include. Most sites grow a menu eventually, and the link is easy to forget later.
Not directly. Its value is to the humans moving through your pages by keyboard, which is reason enough on its own.
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