The Footer Is Doing More Than You Think

Why people go there

Deliberately, which is the part that surprises businesses.

Somebody who cannot find what they want in the menu scrolls to the bottom, because that is where the extra links live and everybody has learned it.

Somebody looking for an address, a phone number, or opening hours goes straight there, frequently without reading the page at all.

And somebody checking whether a business is legitimate looks for a real address, a company registration, or something indicating a physical existence.

Which makes the footer a genuine destination rather than an afterthought, and an empty one wastes a behaviour your visitors already have.

What belongs in it

• Full contact details, including a real address.
• Opening or answering hours.
• A second navigation, including pages not in the menu.
• Legal and policy pages.
• Service area, named.
• Licensing, insurance and memberships.
• A link to your listing and any active profiles.

The first is the one that matters most and it is most often reduced to a bare email address, which tells somebody nothing at all about whether the business is real.

The address question

Genuinely difficult for a home-based business and worth resolving deliberately.

A full address builds trust and is a legitimate concern to publish when it is where you live.

The options: a town and region without a street address, which is honest and sufficient for most purposes; a registered office or mailbox service; or a full address if there are premises.

What does not work is nothing at all, which reads as evasive to a proportion of visitors and removes a signal search engines use for local relevance.

Naming the town you work from, even without a street, is considerably better than nothing.

A worked example

A business whose footer contained a copyright line and nothing else.

They added contact details with a town, opening hours, the towns covered, licence numbers, and a short second navigation.

Analytics showed the footer links being used immediately, particularly by people who had arrived on a service page from a search and were looking for something else.

Two customers separately mentioned having checked the licence number before phoning, which nobody in the business had expected.

The change took an afternoon and it appears on every page of the site, which is the reason a footer repays effort disproportionately.

Consistency across pages

The advantage a footer has over almost anything else.

It appears everywhere, which means anything in it is available regardless of which page somebody landed on.

That matters because most visitors arrive on a service page from a search rather than on the homepage, and everything the homepage would have told them is missing.

The footer is the reliable place to put the things every page needs: who you are, where, how to make contact, and what area you cover.

Which makes it a safety net for the pages that were written without assuming somebody had read anything else.

Structure within it

A footer with twenty items needs organising or it becomes a wall.

Three or four columns with headings: contact, services, about, and legal is a common and sensible arrangement.

Headings matter here for the same reason they matter anywhere, since somebody navigating by structure needs to know what each group is.

On a phone those columns stack, which is fine, and it makes the ordering matter: contact details should come first rather than last.

What does not belong

A few things that are commonly there and are doing nothing.

A newsletter signup form, which almost nobody completes at the bottom of a page, and which would perform better after content worth reading.

A live social feed, which adds weight and a third-party request in exchange for showing posts from 2018.

A repeated call to action identical to one earlier on the page.

And a wall of links to every page on the site, which is a sitemap rather than a footer and helps nobody.

The counter-case

Where a minimal footer is right.

A single-page site where everything is above it and there is nowhere to navigate to.

A checkout or a form step, where anything else is a distraction from completing the task and a link out is a lost sale.

And an application interface rather than a website, where the conventions are different.

For an ordinary business site with more than three pages, the footer is genuinely useful and a copyright line alone is a wasted opportunity.

Repeating the phone number

Worth doing, and it is the single most useful item in a footer for a trade.

Somebody reaching the bottom of a page has read it and is deciding what to do, which is the moment the number should be in front of them.

It should be a tappable link rather than plain text, at a size that can actually be read, with the hours beside it.

That duplicates what is in the header deliberately, because the visitor who scrolled to the bottom is not going to scroll back up to find it.

The same applies to a form: a short one in the footer catches people who finished reading and would otherwise have to navigate.

The copyright line

Worth a note since it is the one thing every footer has.

A year that does not update is a small signal that nobody maintains the site, and it is noticed more than people expect.

Setting it to generate the current year automatically takes a line and removes the problem permanently.

Beyond that it does very little, and it is not what makes anything protected.

What is worth adding beside it: the legal business name if it differs from the trading name, which is a requirement in some contexts and a trust signal in all of them.

What to add

1. Full contact details with at least a town.
2. Hours, including when the phone is answered.
3. The towns you cover.
4. Licence and insurance details.
5. A short second navigation.
6. An auto-updating copyright year.

All of that is an afternoon, appears on every page, and addresses the questions people scroll to the bottom to answer.

What to take out of the menu to put there is covered in menus with too many things in them.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.