A potential customer has read down one of your pages and reached the very bottom. They might have read it closely, skimmed it, or scrolled straight down looking for something specific like your address or a phone number. Whatever brought them there, the footer is the last thing the page can offer them, so it is worth deciding what belongs in it.
A footer is a chance to give website visitors a useful route forward without making them scroll back to the header. It can renew navigation, answer company and support questions, carry the legal and privacy routes a page needs, and sometimes offer a next step.
This guide helps you choose that content, group it, and label it, including how it stacks on a phone. For the primary menu at the top of the page, see the mobile menu guide. This guide is about the bottom of the page.
Quick tip: To review an existing footer, open the page in Online Website Previewer and compare the footer across phone, tablet, and desktop. Look at it as a whole, then read each group and ask what question it answers.
Decide What the Footer Is For
Start by thinking about what visitors who reached the bottom of this particular page want to do, or need to do, next. One wants to get back to browsing, another wants your contact details, and another is looking for a policy or a way to manage their data.
Reaching the bottom is not proof that someone is interested or ready to buy, so do not build the footer around that assumption. It is, however, an indication that they made the effort to scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page, and that they may be ready to take the next step—whatever that next step is in the context of that page. Offer clear routes for different unfinished questions instead.
Nielsen Norman Group’s guidance on footers describes these end-of-page use cases and the content patterns that serve them. A footer does not need to mirror every header group or expose your whole sitemap to be useful.
Group Routes by What They Help Someone Find
A large flat list of links leaves people to work out the relationships themselves. Group the routes by the job they do, such as browsing routes in one place and support or company information in another, and compare each label with the heading and scope of the page it opens.
For a business with a wide geographic spread, links to its states and locations often earn a place in the footer. Real homebuilder sites such as Lennar put state and city routes there, because where you build a home is part of choosing one. On Lennar’s site those routes can sit behind a collapsed “View all regions” control, which is a fair thing to check yourself: if a group is collapsed, can people still discover and reach it, and is its state clear on a phone?
Add a Next Action Only When the Page Supports It
A footer can also help a potential customer who is ready to act take the next step.
If a call to action makes sense for this page—like contacting the right local team after a service explanation—put it in the footer and make it easy to see.
Make that choice page by page rather than dropping the same generic “Subscribe” button into every footer because space is left. Compare the invitation with what the page actually explained and with any action already offered above the footer.
The U.S. Web Design System treats a newsletter signup as conditional on the site’s goal, not as a fixed footer ingredient.
Keep Legal and Privacy Routes Clear
Footers also carry routes that answer different questions from your product navigation: links to key pages, legal pages, ways for visitors to exercise their privacy rights, and any disclaimers a page must show. Check that each label points where it says, then ask whoever owns legal and privacy which notices and controls apply to this business and these pages.
Regulated sites show why context matters. On a Chase savings page, the body explains that savings accounts are FDIC insured, while the footer carries separate investment notices stating products are “NOT FDIC INSURED” along with a Member FDIC deposit line. Those are not contradictory claims—they describe different products—so a message should stay with the context it belongs to. Which disclaimers are required depends on the business and its jurisdiction, so confirm the specifics with legal or compliance rather than copying another company’s wording or assuming every site needs the same footer.
Review the Real Footer in Context
Compare the footer on an informational page and a more commercial one, and look at the narrow layout as well as the wide one. Are the group names visible, the links readable, and the important routes reachable once everything stacks on a phone?
If a group collapses on a smaller screen, check its label, whether its open or closed state is clear, and whether you can still reach and read what is inside. A visual footer review does not establish keyboard or screen-reader accessibility, or whether the privacy controls work correctly, so flag those for the developer or an accessibility reviewer.
Send the Footer Back With a Clear Ask
You do not have to redesign the footer to give useful feedback. Point to the page and screen size, say which routes feel buried or ungrouped, and name the question a visitor could not answer from the bottom of the page.
Imagine, for a hypothetical builder page, that at phone width the state and city routes sit in the same block as the newsletter signup and social icons, so it is hard to tell the browsing routes from the sales prompt. You could ask for the state and city routes to become their own clearly labeled group. Then confirm the required legal and privacy items with the owners who can say what this page must include.
