Is your website footer still useful? A practical check

Scroll to the bottom of your website. Can a customer still find a useful next step, or have they reached a collection of old links and tiny text?

The footer is the section at the foot of a page. It is a good place to keep a small set of useful details available across your site. A tidy footer will not fix unclear service pages, but it gives you one manageable place to check for stale information.

Start with three customer tasks

Before changing the design, write down what someone might need after finishing a page. For a small service business, start with these questions:

• How do I contact you?
• Where can I find the main services or practical information?
• Where are your privacy information and relevant policies?

Use those questions to choose the contents. You do not need to repeat every link from the main menu. A short, labelled group is easier to review and maintain than an unexplained list of everything on the site.

Check contact details against the source

Compare the footer with your current contact page and the details your team actually uses. Check the email address character by character. If you show a telephone number, check both the visible number and the number its link opens.

If opening hours or visit details appear here, make sure they agree with the main information page. For appointment-only businesses, use wording that reflects how visits work. Avoid adding a street address merely to fill a space in the design.

For example, a fictional repair business could use a short line such as “Visits by appointment” beside a link to its booking information. The important part is that this matches the real arrangement.

Keep useful links current

Open each footer link in turn. Does it reach the page the label promises? Check links to service pages, privacy information, booking systems and social profiles. Remove a link to an account you no longer use, or replace it with the correct destination.

Use labels that explain the destination, such as “Contact us” or “Privacy policy”. Where a page has moved, update the footer link to its current address. Our guide to finding and fixing broken website links gives you a practical way to record the checks.

Make the footer readable and recognisable

Do not squeeze useful information into faint, tiny text. Open the page on a phone and check that the footer still has a sensible reading order. Try the links with a keyboard as well as a mouse, and check that you can see which link has focus.

There is also a structural detail for your website editor or developer. W3C describes the page footer as a region for site-wide information and shows how the HTML footer element identifies it. Its page regions tutorial explains the distinction between a page footer and a footer inside an article. Ask your developer to check the page-level structure if this is unclear.

These checks are a useful starting point; they do not replace a full accessibility review.

Check more than the homepage

Open a service page, a blog article and another important page, such as your booking page. Compare their footers. A different page template may have its own footer, so one successful homepage edit is not enough evidence that every page has changed.

Make a short record with the page address, the problem found and the person who will fix it. After an edit, reopen the public page while signed out and repeat the affected check. If the old version still appears, report the exact page and what you see before making more changes.

A small job for this week

Choose three pages and check their contact details, links and phone layout. Fix one clear problem, then confirm the correction on the public site. Add the footer to your next routine website review so it does not become a forgotten corner again.

Would you like to discuss a footer that is difficult to update or use? Contact Hobbit Web Design and send the page address with a short description of the problem.