Sitemaps are essential for positive browsing.
When you browse through various strong web templates, you will notice that their footer has a very user-friendly design and layout. This is no accident, as the footer is crucial to the overall user experience.
A footer is great for keeping people there after they’ve reached the bottom of the page. Menu items are usually displayed to provide more information about a company and its products or services. It can include information such as contact and support information, or focus only on navigation items.
Providing important information to visitors, such as contact information and site policies, is essential for SEO. You should also include conversion points, such as special offers or discounts.
A heat map can give you a lot of useful information about which parts of the footer are used the most. You might be surprised how much it is used:
Most importantly, the footer is the final impression your visitors get on every page they may land on when they first find your website. Therefore, it is very important to ensure that it is easily accessible, usable and informative.
Because of this, a well-designed footer can significantly improve visitor retention and effectively direct them to other parts of your website.
This guide will teach you the best practices for website optimization to improve the user experience.
1. Keep Them Simple
Your website footer should be well structured for easy navigation. The goal is to make sure your visitors can find everything they need without having to scroll to the end – otherwise they might lose interest.
Focus on what’s important first, such as your website, contact details and social media. If there are multiple links (such as product categories or services), vertical alignment is a useful way to organize them on the screen.
If you include an image, choose one that is easy to read and understand. Avoid complicated graphs and statistics.
View the content of the footer page of the Ahrefs website. They have included a clear picture of their team and a recruiting link that is well organized and easy to navigate. They organized additional links, logical buckets, in a vertical style.
You can also see that their About content is in the footer menu, but not in the main menu. Footer menus are a good place to link to content that is not relevant to the main purpose of most people using the site.
The design should not be complicated. Use colors and typography that create a consistent look and feel across your website – these should match your branding strategy and be the same elements used in social media, emails, advertisements and all other online materials.
Correct content spacing and padding can make a website look simple and more readable on different devices. Consistent font size, weight, line height and letter spacing can help you create an attractive visual impact, making your website more professional and fulfilling your website’s accessibility requirements.
2. Include Links to Basic Pages
This website footer best practice applies to navigation. A great footer should reflect the main menu’s most important options and grouping so the user doesn’t have to scroll back.
These navigation options include internal links to your homepage (usually a linked logo), our page and career content, and products or services.
To organize your links effectively, group links into categories with clear, relevant labels like Products, Services, or Company.
For example, if you have a large collection of case studies and blogs, you can use the word “Learn” as a title and category. This makes it easier for visitors to navigate the site and find useful information.
Another good example is the Printing New York website below. The company has nicely organized a large number of services in its footer.
By carefully choosing the main content and structure of important footers, you will not only help improve website navigation. You can also help improve your search engine optimization. Well-structured navigation helps search engine crawlers understand your most important pages. They help build your authority and credibility, which is important for SEO.
Remember that footers shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a page. They complement the site’s main menu navigation – they should not be intended to replace it due to its minimal look and feel. Oversimplification hurts the user experience.
3. Include Newsletter Signup Form
You can also add a subscription form to your website to efficiently collect and validate email addresses for your subscriber list. Footer placement makes sense because of the behavior that website visitors tend to have—they’re more likely to scroll to the bottom of the page to look for blog links or ways to contact you. If they do, they won’t miss your lead generation form.
Check out this example from Bria, a virtual mental health clinic:
Even as a footer element, your newsletter needs to stand out. However, if your form blends in with other elements, visitors may miss it.
There are many ways to make your shape stand out. For example, Bria decided to put her website in the middle of the footer. The form also takes up a lot of space.
If you choose this strategy, don’t be discouraged. Your form can only have a limited number of fields. You don’t want your visitors to be turned off by the many fields they have to fill out. Gartner does not recommend more than five form fields for best results.
As a final tip, make sure you have an attractive and easy to understand call to action. The call to action should also stand out. For example, you can choose a CTA color that contrasts with the rest of the form color, as seen in our Bria example.
4. Insert Legal Information
The footer area is a standard place where the author and ownership of the site is clearly stated.
Your privacy policy is crucial for SEO and it is very important to include legal information in your footer. This information protects your creative work and provides important information about website ownership and usage rights.
Some of the legal options commonly included in website footers include:
- Privacy Policy
- Cookie Policy
- Return Policy
- Terms and Conditions
- Business licenses
- Accessibility
- Security
- Credits and/or copyright details
Here’s HubSpot’s footer as an example:
Including these links in your footer will increase the trust of your viewers. This shows them – and the search engines – that you are a legitimate, registered and compliant business.
5. Introduce Contact Information
Another important footer for SEO is your contact information. This is one of the best practices of the website footer that helps build trust in your business and gives users clear paths to reach you.
Your contact information should consist of the following:
- Name, Address and Phone Number: This information directly impacts your local SEO efforts and must be current and accurate. They should also overlap with all of your other online information, such as maps, review sites, social profiles and business directories.
- Email Address: Enter an email address where potential customers can contact you.
- Social Media Icons: Social links can help you increase engagement. You can also improve your ranking through social media SEO. Social media icons can also help grow your email list.
- Maps: Traditional businesses can include a map of their physical location in the footer. This helps customers find the business and improves accessibility.
Just organize the footers in an understandable format.
6. Incorporate Additional Supporting Content
There are other elements you may include in your footer to boost the user experience, apart from the ones we mentioned above.
For example, attribution statements are short paragraphs of text that acknowledge the original creators of the content on your website. These may include photos, written content, videos or other creative works not mentioned on individual pages. For example, if all the content is written or photographed by one person, one footer will do.
These statements demonstrate that you are an ethical company that provides appropriate assurances where appropriate. Here is an example of a creation statement:
The second element is the recognition of the state. Increasingly, Canadian businesses are including a script in their footer that acknowledges the First Nation country where their business is located.
Adding logos is a great way to show your brand identity and use a social display in your footer.
You can add logos of partners, sponsors or media where your company has been featured.
Miracon dedicates certain sections of its website footer to logos.
The placement and size of logos in the footer section can also affect the user experience and how you represent the featured organizations. Make sure the logos are high quality, appropriately sized and organized so they don’t look like random stickers.
In Closing
Businesses now recognize the crucial role of website footers in modern web design. No longer just an afterthought, they are a key piece of a great UX design
Keep them simple and include links to important pages. Use your footer to give readers easy access to legal information about your site and how it works. Add the newsletter subscription form.
Your contact information is also important, as are social media links and email addresses. Finally, add other supporting elements such as logos and credits.
Your contact information is also important, as are social media links and email addresses. Finally, add other supporting elements such as logos and credits.