The footer appears on every page and gets designed once, usually last. It answers questions, catches people who scrolled past everything, and carries obligations you may not have met.

A footer is on every page, which makes it the most repeated element on the site and the one with the most cumulative views. It does three jobs: it catches people who reached the bottom without acting, it answers the practical questions the page did not, and it carries the legal and contact information the business is obliged or expected to publish.

Who reaches the footer and why

Two kinds of people. Those who read the page, were not convinced, and are looking for something else, and those who came specifically for a fact: an address, a phone number, a privacy policy, an opening time. The first group needs navigation and an offer. The second needs the fact to be findable without scanning. Design for both and the footer stops being decoration.

What belongs there

A compact version of the main navigation, contact details, a route to the primary action, legal pages, and anything a visitor reliably looks for at the bottom. Keep it to what people use. A footer with sixty links in six columns is a sitemap, and it dilutes the signal that internal linking is supposed to send.

  • Main sections, in the same order as the navigation.
  • Contact details someone can act on.
  • One route to the primary action.
  • Privacy, terms, and whatever local law requires.

Internal links: useful, not a dump

A footer link appears on every page, which makes it a strong internal signal and easy to overuse. Link the pages that deserve site-wide prominence: main services, the most important secondary pages, the location or industry pages you actually want found. Do not list every article. If a section needs fifty links to be navigable, the problem is the site structure, not the footer.

Legal and contact obligations

What is required differs by country and business type, and it is usually more than companies publish. Many jurisdictions require an identifiable provider, registration details or a specific contact route on the site itself. Publish a privacy policy and terms, link them from the footer, and check what your own jurisdiction expects rather than copying a competitor who may also be wrong.

Consent and cookie settings

If the site sets analytics or marketing cookies, visitors need a way to change their mind after the banner has gone. The footer is the conventional place for that control, and its absence is a common compliance gap on otherwise careful sites.

Mobile order matters more than desktop columns

A footer that reads as four tidy columns stacks into a long list on a phone, and whatever sits last is effectively invisible. Decide the stacking order deliberately: contact and the primary action first, secondary navigation after, legal last. Test it on a real phone rather than in a resized browser window.

Consistency is an accessibility requirement

Repeated navigation, including the footer, should keep the same order across pages. That is a WCAG requirement, and it also matches how people use a footer: they learn where a thing is once and expect it to stay there. A footer that varies by template quietly makes the site harder to use.

What to cut

A newsletter form nobody has signed up to in a year. Social icons for accounts that have not posted since 2022, each of which is an invitation to leave your site. Duplicated contact forms. A wall of award badges. An address, if publishing your home address is a privacy problem, in which case keep it in the structured data and on the legal pages where it is required, and leave the city in the footer.

Practical decision checklist

  • Decide the two audiences the footer serves before designing it.
  • Include contact details someone can act on.
  • Link main sections, not every page.
  • Add privacy, terms and a cookie settings control.
  • Check local requirements for identifying the business.
  • Set the mobile stacking order deliberately and test it on a phone.
  • Keep the footer identical across templates.

Frequently asked questions

Should the footer repeat the whole navigation?

A compact version of the main sections, yes, in the same order. A full sitemap of every page, no; it adds length without helping anyone navigate.

Is a footer good for SEO?

Footer links are real internal links and they pass signals site-wide, which is exactly why they should be selective. A handful of deliberate links is worth more than fifty that say everything is equally important.

Should the address be in the footer?

For a business with premises customers visit, yes. For a business run from home, the city is usually enough in the footer, with the full address in the structured data and on the legal pages where it is legally required.

How tall should a footer be?

As tall as its contents need and no taller. A footer that fills a screen on desktop becomes an extremely long scroll on a phone, which is where most visitors will meet it.