What is a Footer on a Website?

A footer compiles helpful links into one predictable place, giving every page a second layer of site navigation. When visitors can’t find what they need on the homepage or in the menu, they scroll to the bottom of the page and look for practical details like a business address, store hours, or copyright notices.

That habit is well documented. Nielsen Norman Group’s footer design-patterns study (February 24, 2019) found people use footers in two ways: as a last resort for content they couldn’t find in the main navigation, and as the place they deliberately scroll to for contact details and company information. The same study calls the footer “a cost-free addition to the user experience” because it never gets in the way of visitors who found what they needed higher up the page.

Standard footer elements

Lead with the 2 or 3 tasks visitors actually scroll down to complete, usually contact and legal information, and cut anything nobody clicks. The standard components:

• Utility and legal links: contact information, customer service pages, the privacy policy, terms of use, and a copyright notice.
• Doormat navigation: a secondary menu that repeats the site’s main sections, so visitors can move on from any page.
• Secondary-task links: pages like careers or press that matter to a few visitors but don’t earn space in the main menu.
• Customer engagement: a newsletter signup and social media icons.

A footer can also be designed as an HTML sitemap: a set of links outlining the site’s main pages that helps visitors find their way regardless of which page they’re currently on. That’s different from the XML sitemap file you submit to search engines. An HTML sitemap footer earns its space on large sites with deep information architecture; on a 10-page site, it’s clutter. If you want the footer to stay visible while visitors scroll, that’s a separate pattern: see sticky header/footer.

Footer vs. header

The header and footer bookend every page, and they split the work:

• Header: sits at the top and carries what visitors need first: the logo, search, and the primary navigation menu.
• Footer: sits at the bottom and carries the utility content people look for when the main content didn’t answer them: contact details, legal links, and secondary navigation.

Editing your footer in WordPress

Where you edit the footer depends on your theme. With a block theme, go to Appearance → Editor and open the footer template part; WordPress.org’s Site Editor documentation notes that changes to the footer template apply to every page that uses it, so one edit updates the whole site. Classic themes don’t include the Site Editor. They use widget areas instead: WordPress.org’s widgets guide notes these areas typically sit in the sidebar or footer, vary from theme to theme, and are managed through Appearance → Widgets or the Customizer. Our guide to WordPress full-site editing walks through the block-theme workflow step by step.

Footer links and SEO

Internal footer links help search engines discover pages: they’re part of the linking structure crawlers follow through your site. Don’t expect a rankings lift from them, though. Google’s search team said in January 2016 that sitewide header and footer links “are not a very great weight in general,” and John Mueller added that Google pays the most attention to links in a page’s primary content (Search Engine Roundtable, January 27, 2016). So keep footer links limited to pages visitors genuinely want: keyword-stuffed footer links carry little ranking weight, and they bury the links people scrolled down to find. For how search engines treat an individual link in that region, see footer link.

Next step: scroll to your own footer and audit it against the list above. Keep the links visitors actually use, cut the rest, and make sure the copyright year is current while you’re there.