The footer appears on every page and is usually the last thing anyone thinks about, which is why it fills up with whatever had no other home. It has three genuine jobs: confirming who you are, providing the routes people look for at the bottom of a page, and carrying the legal and contact details that make a business look real.
What people actually use it for
Two behaviours, and they are opposite.
Some visitors scroll to the bottom deliberately, looking for a phone number, an address, or confirmation that the business is real. That is a trust check and it is a common one, particularly before enquiring.
Others reach it by finishing the page, at which point the footer is the only thing offering a next step. That makes it a navigation opportunity rather than a dead end.
Both are served by a footer that is deliberate and neither is served by one that has become a dumping ground.
What belongs there
Who you are
Legal business name, phone number as a tappable link, email, and at least the municipality. This is the trust check people scroll for, and a footer that omits it makes a business look less established than it is.
The main routes, repeated
A short list of the important pages, usually the services and the contact page. Not a duplicate of the entire navigation, which becomes unreadable on a phone.
The legal pages
Privacy policy, terms if you have them, and an accessibility statement. This is the conventional location and it is where people look for them.
Credentials
Licence numbers, insurance confirmation, and association memberships. These are quiet trust signals that suit a footer precisely because they do not need prominence.
Service area
Named places, which for a local business is one of the two questions every visitor has and is frequently missing from the pages above.
What accumulates there and should not
- Every page on the site. A footer reproducing forty links is a sitemap, and nobody reads it.
- An embedded social feed, which loads slowly and shows whatever happened to be posted last.
- A newsletter signup with no offer, which converts at close to nothing and takes space.
- Badges nobody recognises, including certification logos with no explanation of what they mean.
- A second contact form, which competes with the one on the page above it.
- A copyright year that is wrong, which is a small thing that quietly signals an unmaintained site.
The year problem
Worth its own mention because it is so common and so easy to fix.
A footer reading 2019 tells every visitor the site has not been touched in years, whether or not that is true. Hard-coding the year guarantees this happens, because nobody remembers to change it on the first of January.
The fix is a single line of script that inserts the current year automatically. Set once and it is correct permanently, which removes an entirely avoidable credibility problem.
On a phone
Footers are designed on a desktop in columns and then stack into a very long block on a phone.
A four-column footer becomes four stacked sections the visitor scrolls through after already reaching the bottom of the page. Where that block is long, the practical effect is that nobody reaches the contact details at the end of it.
The correction is to put the important things first in the source order, so they appear at the top of the stacked version, and to keep the total short enough that it does not become its own page.
The credit line
Where a designer or agency built the site, a small credit is conventional and reasonable. What matters is that it is small, and that it sits alongside your details rather than in place of them.
A footer where the builder's name is more prominent than the business's own is a common and slightly odd arrangement, and it is worth checking whose site it looks like at a glance.
The check
Scroll to the bottom of your own site on a phone and ask three questions.
Can I find the phone number without hunting. Does it say who the business is and roughly where. Is there anything here that nobody has looked at in three years. Those three questions usually produce a shorter, more useful footer, and the details it should carry are set out in displaying your business information correctly.
Frequently asked questions
What should a website footer contain?
Your legal business name, a tappable phone number, email, at least the municipality, a short list of main pages, the legal pages, credentials, and your service area.
What should not be in a footer?
Every page on the site, an embedded social feed, a newsletter box with no offer, unexplained badges, a second contact form, and a hard-coded copyright year.
Why does the copyright year matter?
A footer reading a year several years old tells every visitor the site has not been touched since, whether or not that is true. A single line of script keeps it current automatically.
Do people actually read the footer?
Some scroll there deliberately looking for a phone number or confirmation the business is real, which is a trust check. Others arrive by finishing the page, at which point it is the only next step offered.
How should a footer work on a phone?
Columns stack into a long block, so the important details should come first in the source order and the whole thing should be short enough that people reach the end of it.
Should the web designer's credit be in the footer?
A small credit is conventional and reasonable. What matters is that it sits alongside your own details rather than being more prominent than the business the site belongs to.
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.
Footer full of things nobody has looked at in years?
We rebuild it around what people actually scroll down for, and make sure the year takes care of itself.
Start a Conversation