Site footer

The site footer is where a page puts everything that has to exist and must not compete: the legal pages nobody reads until they need them, the contact route, the second tier of navigation, the newsletter box, the copyright line. It is defined by its job rather than its position, which is why it survives in interfaces that have no bottom of the page at all. Marked up as <footer> at the top level of the document it is the contentinfo landmark, which is how a screen reader user jumps straight to it, and that is worth getting right precisely because the content there is the content people go looking for on purpose.

The fat footer, a grid of headed link columns amounting to a small sitemap, became the default for a reason. Readers arrive at the bottom of a page in one of two states: they finished, or the page failed them. Both are moments when offering the whole site cheaply is more useful than offering nothing, and the footer is the one place where a long list of links costs the design nothing, because whatever it pushes down is only more footer. The craft is in the columns having real headings and a defensible order. A fat footer that is just forty links in four columns is a wall, and a wall at the bottom of a page reads as abandonment.

The word to keep separate is sticky footer, which sounds like a kind of footer and is not. That term names a positioning behaviour, holding the footer against the bottom of the viewport when the content is too short to push it there, and it applies to this region only incidentally: the site footer is a region defined by what it contains, and it stays that region whether it is pinned, pushed, or scrolled past. The page header is its opposite number at the top, and the two are usually designed as a pair, since anything that loses the argument for the header ends up here.

Two failures are worth naming. The first is reachability: pair a footer with infinite scroll and it becomes unreachable, because new content loads faster than a reader can get past it, which is how a support link disappears from a site that still technically has one. Either abandon the infinite list, use an explicit load control, or move the footer’s essentials somewhere with an end. The second is accretion. A footer is the path of least resistance for any link nobody wants to argue about, so it grows until it is a second homepage in a smaller type size. The test is whether a reader skimming the headings could find the one thing they came for; when the answer stops being yes, the fix is deletion, not another column.