What to Include in Your Website's Footer
by Lucas Stahl
Posted on April 30, 2018
The essentials for every website footer.
4 Needs for every footer:
So, you have your footer at the bottom of your page, right? If not, here is a link to learn how to create a sticky footer. You should feel pretty good by this point because making your footer stick to the bottom of your website is easier said than done. Now you need to know what content should be included in your footer. The basics to include are the year created and a link that drives visitors back to your home page, but there is so much more. Listed below are 4 great additions for every footer.
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Adding a like to the About page is a must because Google Analytics tell you that the About page is one of the most if not the most visited site on any page. If you don’t have one, create one, and if you have one add it to your footer.
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Contact is another must for your footer. Think about your call to action, for every page there should be some sort of call to action. Having your contact page on the footer increases your call to action across all pages. It also increases the user experience because if your site has a large amount of content scrolling all the way back to the nav bar is not ideal. Having a contact at the bottom gives the user access from both the nav and the footer encompassing your entire site. This makes it harder for users to say they didn’t know how to connect with you.
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Privacy Policy and Terms of Use are additional needs for every site because it gives the site owner the opportunity to express how they are using their site to collect data. It’s important to let your visitors know where they can read up on your sites privacy policy because collecting individual’s data without informing them can lead to legal issues later down the road. Adding the privacy policy to the footer is a best practice and incredibly important. Regarding Terms of Use, I lumped these two together because they almost go hand-in-hand. Terms of Use is another great section for explaining how you are using third parties such as Google Analytics to collect data. Additionally, there are great free generators out there for building privacy policy html files and terms of use html files. Once you have those files you can add them to whatever project you are working on. I have added them in the resource section below.
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One that isn’t required but is a nice touch is a Site Map. Every page should have an XML site map file that exists in the root directory of your project. Once again there is a generator for creating a Site Map XML. However, we are not talking about the actual XML file rather an html file that mirrors the XML file but fits in the design of your website. Companies that have excellent site maps are Apple and Northwestern Medicine. A site map lists all pages on your website and is used by search engines to crawl over your website in order to track how many pages you have. Once you have created this site map you should also add it to Google Search Console, so that Google knows your site has it. Adding a site map helps with the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your website. Note, you want to make sure it updates if you add pages, typically the generator will account for this, but confirm it once you build out a new page or add a new post if your posts exist on their own pages.
Honorable mention goes to social media and search bar. While I don’t think having your social media in the footer is a must, it definitely needs to be somewhere in your site, so a footer is as good a place as any. Adding a search bar is a nice touch, it gives users the ability to search content specific to your site, however, I find the user experience to be better suited for the nav bar at the top of your site, rather than the bottom. It doesn’t hurt to have both, but by then your footer may start to be a little too cluttered.
Here are a couple resources to help improve your footer’s reach.
Related Resources
I hope this was helpful and feel free to comment with suggestions or questions.
- Man of Stahl
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