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If you think a website footer is a bit boring, I‘d be the first to agree. But just because your footer is the most boring spot on your website doesn’t mean it's not important.
Implemented well, you can use your website's boring old footer to improve the experience for your visitors, cover important legal topics, and also make it easier for search engine crawlers to understand your website.
In this post, I'll cover everything you need to know about creating an effective website footer, including some of my favorite real-world website footer examples to inspire you.
Table of Contents
- What is the footer of a website?
- What to Put in a Website Footer
- Best Website Footer Examples
- Types of Website Footer Designs
- Which Footer Links to Add for SEO
- How to Optimize Your Website Footer
- Website Footer Design FAQs
What is the footer of a website?
A website's footer is the section located at the very bottom of a web page and typically continues across the entire website. It generally includes essential sitewide information such as a copyright notice and contact information, along with links to key pages such as a site's privacy policy and "About" page.
Some websites will also include other content to help connect with readers, such as social media icons and an email subscribe form.
While a website‘s footer is "below the fold" and requires the most scrolling to reach, it’s still an important part of creating a good user experience on your site. It can also affect other areas, such as search engine optimization (SEO).
Don't get me wrong — most of your visitors will not spend a lot of time looking at your footer. But for the visitors who make it down there, it's important to get it right.
Now, let’s take a look at the best website footer design examples to inspire you.
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Best Website Footer Examples
Rather than jumping into the principles of a good website footer right away, I think it's useful to first look at some real-world website footer examples.
Below, I‘ve put together 20 of my favorite examples. Then, in the next sections, I’ll dig into how you should think about creating your own website footer. (And if you need some overall web design inspiration, check out these 77 website design examples.)
As you browse through the examples, you might note that a lot of them seem kind of “boring.” This is by intent, as I think that the footer should be a comparatively boring place for most websites. You might have noticed this in my somewhat tongue-in-cheek introduction!
However, I will still include a few more creative footer examples to give you an idea of what some brands do, as I‘m sure that some of you won’t want to go with the boring footer approach.
1. Lorelei Londres
Lorelei Londres is a luxury hotel in Italy that strives to provide hospitality and charm. Its footer succeeds in both aspects.
There’s contact information on the left, navigation links at the center, and a newsletter opt-in form to the right. On the right, there’s also the privacy policy link and the submit form directly in the footer.
Below, there’s another link to the privacy policy, cookie policy, and the agency that created the website, as well as the copyright notice.
It achieves all of this while still managing to convey a luxury feeling, thanks to the background image of the pool.
What I like: The full-screen background image in the footer really caught my eye; it’s an uncommon addition that’s greatly appreciated, especially when you’re planning a vacation and want to find a hotel with views.
A lot of websites use fixed background colors for their footers, which can be the right choice in a lot of situations. However, because Lorelei Londres wants to convey a more luxurious feeling, I think that they nailed the footer background.
If you want to add some creativity to your footer while still keeping things fairly straightforward, I think that this can be a good middle ground.
2. Drunk Elephant
Drunk Elephant is a beauty brand that offers biocompatible skincare products. The footer of the Drunk Elephant website contains the information you expect — a well-organized menu of product categories, ways to learn about the brand, legal info, social media accounts, and more.
What I like: What this footer does best — in addition to clarity and readability – is leveraging Drunk Elephant’s bold and vibrant brand colors and overall aesthetic. The bright yellow background might be out of place on other websites, but it really fits well with the rest of the website color scheme that Drunk Elephant uses.
3. Spline Group
Spline Group is a Canadian mechanical, plumbing, and electrical engineering firm that values effective communication and simplicity.
This is clear in its footer, which uses a very minimalist design.
It features black text on a white background. There’s an address and links to its Instagram, LinkedIn, and Careers page.
Below that is bold, clickable text: “Let’s talk" CTA. Instead of linking to a contact form (which I personally think might be a better choice), the CTA is pre-configured to open the visitor's email client and pre-fill the email subject line.
What I like: For any type of agency or consulting firm, I always think it's a great idea to put some type of “get in touch” CTA in the footer because it gives you one more chance to connect with potential clients. Spline Group achieves an eye-catching CTA despite using a very minimalist color palette in its footer.
4. Art4web
Art4web is a creative digital and branding studio committed to making unique websites, mobile apps, and brand designs.
It has one of the taller footers that you‘ll find on a website, which is why I think it’s a good example to consider.
I definitely don‘t think every website should have a footer that is this tall. However, for Art4web’s specific use case of wanting potential clients to get in contact with them, I think it works.
With that being said, I do think they could have removed the Saul Bass quote without losing anything, which would've let them shrink its size a little bit.
What I like: Art4web really encourages website visitors to get in touch with them by including the “Let's start” CTA area on every page of their site via the footer. As I mentioned above, I think it's a great idea to include a contact CTA in your footer if you run any type of agency or consulting firm.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is a popular website builder that makes it easy for users to create simple websites without requiring any technical knowledge.
While the actual footer design is quite simple, it's packed with internal links to a variety of different areas. These links include information about the product, resources for existing customers, company information, and more.
What I like: Squarespace's footer is a great example of how you can use a website footer to create a sort of HTML sitemap for important content on your site. This helps your human visitors access important content while also functioning as an important part of on-page SEO.
6. Tenzo
With a mission to provide a clean caffeine beverage alternative to coffee, Tenzo sells matcha tea in an affordable, accessible way.
Its website footer design offers more opportunities for engagement. Visitors who want to stay connected can follow Tenzo on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
The footer also contains important links for visitors who are looking for different ways to purchase Tenzo's products or want to learn more about matcha or the company.
It also uses a nice green background color, which connects with the green of the matcha tea.
What I like: Tenzo’s footer links under the section “More from Tenzo” are great examples of how businesses can use the footer for the less common links that they might not want to include in their primary navigation menus.
For example, there’s “Wholesale Opportunities” and “Affiliate” — two B2B-oriented links that are not found in Tenzo’s top navigation menu.
Tenzo Tea also makes sure to leverage one more opportunity to get visitors to engage with its social media profiles.
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7. Mando
Mando is a brand that offers full-body deodorant in a variety of different formats, along with other companion products that fit the same niche.
Mando has rapidly grown in popularity and now sells through its own ecommerce store and other brick-and-mortar channels.
The Mando footer includes an email subscribe form, some copywriting microtext, internal links, and a fun fox icon.
What I like: Mando's footer is fairly standard for the ecommerce space, with an email subscribe form and some relevant links. There are two things that I think make it stand out, though.
First, I like how Mando takes another opportunity to highlight its money-back guarantee and free shipping, as these could help convince some customers who are on the fence. Second, I love how they include the fox icon in the bottom-left corner, as it adds some fun and playfulness to what is otherwise a pretty minimalist website footer.
8. Expedia
I‘ve always found the footers of travel booking sites to be incredibly interesting because they’re often a great example of the best practices for melding on-page SEO with user experience.
Typically, you'll see these types of sites try to balance providing helpful links to human visitors with internal links to the key pages that they want to rank in search engines.
Expedia is no exception here — the “Company,” ”Policies,“ and ”Help“ columns are focused on providing important links to humans, while the ”Explore" column gives Expedia a chance to link to the key pillar pages that it wants to rank in search engines.
What I like: While Expedia's footer is very simple from a design perspective, I like how it provides a balance of internal links that satisfies both human visitors and search engines.
9. Chipotle
The Chipotle website footer has a lot going on, which is why I think it's another great website footer example to share with you.
Chipotle's footer tries to balance providing links to important information while also promoting a few different things:
- Chipotle Rewards — With the bold red icon, the CTA to join Chipotle Rewards is the most eye-catching part of the footer.
- Chipotle apps — The app store icons for iOS and Android also draw users' attention.
- Social media icons — These aren't quite as eye-catching because Chipotle has chosen to use a single color that blends in with other links.
In addition to promoting those elements, Chipotle also includes some essential links, both in the section with the white background and the smaller section at the bottom (which includes more legal-focused pages such as Chipotle's privacy policy).
What I like: Chipotle‘s footer is a great example of how, if you design your footer well, you can use it to achieve multiple purposes without seeming too "busy." While the footer has a lot of different elements, it still has a clean design and plenty of empty space, which doesn’t make it feel overwhelming.
10. Will Ventures
Will Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that mostly works with consumer, health, and media startups.
Its black-and-white website helps present the user with clear options, while also working to prevent information overload.
It opts not to provide a bunch of internal links like a lot of other footer examples. Instead, it just includes an email signup form and links to two social media profiles.
What I like: The Will Ventures footer includes some creative elements that you won‘t see in a lot of other footers, which is what I think makes it stand out as an example. While you can’t see this in the static screenshot above, the “Will” text is actually animated and changes at certain points.
11. Tāmras Gin
Tāmras Gin is meant to invoke the lush paddy fields, backwaters, and rustic charm of the village of Colvale in Goa. Its website footer also aims to invoke these images.
It features hand-drawn-style graphics of people drinking and relaxing beneath trees, which represent the botanicals and citrus fruit used in the gin.
These graphics also serve another purpose: to frame the logo, email opt-in form, and other standard elements of a footer like the Instagram social icon.
What I like: I’m really impressed by how this footer uses imagery to draw my eye to the email opt-in form. The graphics also help to reinforce Tāmras Gin's brand.
12. Amazon
Amazon probably needs no introduction in terms of what the purpose of the site is. However, what you might not be as familiar with is all the different brands that are part of the Amazon family.
This includes Amazon sub-brands like Amazon Music and Amazon TV, along with lots of other separate brands including Whole Foods Markets, Zappos, Goodreads, IMDb, and many more.
Having all of those brands is why I wanted to include this example. The Amazon website footer actually serves two different purposes, which is what makes it unique:
- At the top of the footer, it includes Amazon-specific links that customers and sellers will be interested in.
- At the bottom of the footer, it includes links to all of the other brands within the Amazon family.
What I like: While your business might not be on the same scale as Amazon, I think this is a great example of how to handle things if you have multiple brands or sub-brands within your business umbrella. You can use your website footer to serve your website visitors while also introducing them to all the other things that you offer.
13. Lemkus
Lemkus is a leading retailer of sporting apparel and branded sneakers in South Africa. Its website design is crafted to be as unique as its product designs.
Its footer uses a somewhat unique approach. While most of the page uses a black and white design, the footer has a bold yellow background. It manages to avoid this feeling “random” by tying the yellow with a few accents earlier in the page.
What I like: In addition to the bold yellow background, Lemkus also includes a huge white version of its logo that spans the entire footer. Most ecommerce stores use simpler footers that just include internal links, but I think Lemkus's bold color and logo choice actually fit with its streetwear styling.
However, there's also one element that I don't like — the live chat icon covers up the link to the Facebook page. If you're using a floating live chat widget (or any other floating widget), this example is a good reminder to test whether the widget will cover up content in your footer if the user scrolls all the way down.
14. Huble
Huble is a digital agency that helps businesses build and enhance how they use the HubSpot CRM. With over 175+ employees and 7 global offices, it's one of the largest HubSpot partners out there.
What I like: The Huble website footer does a great job of combining some important CTAs with relevant links. If you look at the website footers of agency websites, you'll see these types of “book a call with our team” CTAs a lot, and I think that Huble has done a great job of implementing this style on the Huble website.
15. The Financial Diet
The Financial Diet, a personal finance website, uses a two-section approach to its footer.
The top section has three colorful boxes focused on three different areas — social media links, an email subscribe form, and a “Write for us” link.
Below that, it uses a much more minimal section. The bottom section is literally just the copyright notice, a contact form, privacy and terms, and an affiliate disclosure. If your website earns money from affiliate content, you must have an affiliate disclosure somewhere that visitors can access, and the footer is a common place for this link.
What I like: I‘m glad to see that The Financial Diet includes its affiliate disclosure on every page. I’m a huge proponent of transparency and appreciate that this site is upfront with its readers about its affiliate relationships.
If you earn with affiliate marketing, I recommend that you do the same — it might even be the law, depending on your jurisdiction.
16. Olipop
Olipop is a popular soda alternative that offers delicious drinks with low sugar and high fiber. I find myself personally addicted to the root beer and cream soda flavors and buying my Olipop in bulk is what caused me to notice the Olipop footer.
What I like: The Olipop footer does a great job of handling the need to display relevant internal links while still taking advantage of one last chance to promote the Olipop email newsletter and social media profiles.
Beyond content, I also like how the footer gets its own unique background color and there's a cool wavy divider separating it from the main body content. This is a great way to add some interest to an otherwise “boring” footer.
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17. HubSpot
I‘d be remiss if I didn’t include a footer example from HubSpot in this list. If you want to experience it for yourself, you can scroll down to the bottom of this page. However, the screenshot above does a pretty good job of showing you what's going on.
Like some of the other examples above, the HubSpot website footer focuses more on including relevant links, rather than trying to include a creative design. While creative designs can be fun on personal portfolio sites, I think that link-heavy footer designs make a lot more sense for software products and ecommerce stores.
What I like: The footer does a great job of promoting the most popular features in the free HubSpot CRM, along with some of the many free tools that HubSpot offers. These links help human visitors find content they might be interested in, while also serving as an important on-page SEO tactic that helps important pages rank well in search engines like Google.
18. WebMD
WebMD is a popular content website that helps readers live healthier lives. If you‘ve ever been sick and found yourself searching Google for your symptoms, you’ve probably encountered WebMD — I know I have!
It includes lots of information on diseases and conditions, along with more general well-being content.
What I like: I like the WebMD website footer because it shows the opposite approach to internal link-heavy footers that you'll see on other sites. Instead, WebMD uses its footer to promote its email newsletter, mobile apps, and social media pages.
Neither approach is better than the other; I think it really just depends on your specific goals.
19. Olivier Tardif
Web developer Olivier Tardif pulls out all the stops in this fun and imaginative footer, which takes up the entire screen after you scroll down.
It includes a meta note about the footer: “This is the end of the page, but the beginning of our journey.” That’s a great way to summarize the utility of this section.
A paper airplane flies around the screen, signaling that visitors should send a message to him for a work opportunity.
What I like: The bottom CTA is clear and unmissable: “We should talk.” Serious, but reflective of his tone and personality. When you click on it, a pop-up slides onto the screen with a contact form. Everything about this footer is delightful. All in all, I think it's a great example of how to be more creative with your website footer while still handling the fundamentals well.
20. Toggl
Toggl got its start as a time tracking tool for businesses and individuals. In fact, it's the time tracker tool that I personally use, which is why its footer caught my eye.
Since then, Toggl has expanded to offer multiple tools, including time tracking, team planning, full-cycle hiring, and expense management.
What I like: I love the Toggl website footer because it uses a more interesting design, rather than just relying on a text list of links like a lot of other software products. There's certainly nothing wrong with just including links — but I think that the more colorful way that Toggl promotes its different services really fits with the playful nature of the brand.
Another interesting detail is that Toggl also tweaks its website footer depending on the specific product that you're looking at, so you will see more text-heavy footers if you look at some other products.
Types of Website Footer Designs
As you might have noticed in the footer examples above, there can be a lot of variation in the different types of website footers that you see.
Below, I'll cover some of the most common types of website footers, which will bring some structure to the examples that you saw above.
Fat Footer
A “fat footer” includes the grand majority of the website’s sitemap and usually categorizes links by a common theme or need. This is a good option for you if you have many pages that users could potentially be interested in.
In the above example, Asana includes links for its own company pages, solutions, and resources. It’s neat and easy to scan, which is what you want in a website footer.
At the bottom are the more common links that you'll see in website footers, such as to the company’s terms and privacy pages, as well as its social profiles.
Narrow Footer
A narrow footer has a much smaller footprint because it only contains the very basic details that all footers need, such as links to privacy policy, terms of service, and maybe a few others.
By having a more limited selection of links, you can choose to really focus on just the most important links on your site.
In the above example, Temple University includes a few essential links for students and staff, along with some basic legal information.
No Footer (or Invisible Footer)
If your website is particularly artsy, or if you have a one-page website, you may not need a footer (although you should always include copyright information and terms of use, as in the above example).
As the example above shows, one way to achieve the “invisible footer” effect is to make it the same background color as the rest of the page.
You can also use this approach on parts of your site that utilize infinite scroll, as displaying a real footer that keeps getting pushed down as content loads is not a good experience for your visitors.
That said, even if you don’t have a footer, you could always maximize your copyright area by including social and email links, like the above example.
Product Footer
Businesses that sell a specific line of products (like SaaS companies) can benefit from a more product-focused footer.
Essentially, the first links users see are for the products and their features, like in HubSpot’s footer, pictured above. Company links and other pages are usually listed last in this type of footer, or sometimes not at all.
This example is particularly effective because it lists features first, which is what users are usually looking for when they’re searching for a product (i.e., they’re not searching for the product itself but for a benefit).
This type of footer can also work great for SEO as it lets you send internal link power to important feature/benefit pages for your product.
At the same time, you're still free to include all of the more “standard” website footer links.
Legalese Footer
A legalese footer contains pertinent legal information that website visitors should know when scrolling through your website. While Apple includes a lot of different elements in its footer, I think it also exemplifies this type of footer with its paragraph upon paragraph of legal footnotes at the top of the footer.
You can always create a legalese footer, even if it’s a simple line, such as “All views are my own and do not represent...”
You can also mix this type of footer with other types, such as narrow or fat footers. Again, you can see this with Apple's full footer, as Apple includes lots of other elements beyond just legalese.
CTA Footer
CTA footers are a popular type of footer that includes either a contact form, an email form, or a prompt to call your team.
This type of footer is great for converting traffic that may be showing exit intent, which could be better (and less annoying) than an exit intent pop-up.
It’s also a good way to re-engage users when they get to the bottom of the page.
In my experience, CTA footers are especially popular with ecommerce stores and service businesses/agencies, though I've also seen them used in a lot of other situations, including on blogs.
Site Index Footer
Site index footers include all of the links on your website — a great option if your site is small. You can kind of think of them like an HTML sitemap that's available on every page of your site.
This type of footer is great for improving the user experience and ensuring visitors find what they’re looking for if they can’t find it using your top navigation menu. Having these internal links to important pages can also be beneficial for SEO in my experience.
However, this approach won‘t work for large websites. In my experience, it’s really only viable if your site has fewer than 10 pages or so.
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What to Put in a Website Footer
I think that deciding what to put in a website footer can be a little tricky because it requires the right balancing act.
It‘s basically walking the line between some different types of content. Typically, your footer should contain content that’s important enough to be on most/every page on your site, but not so important that you need to put it in the primary navigation or higher up the page.
In addition to adding content that helps your visitors, there are also some other considerations for what to put in a website footer:
- Legal requirements or best practices. Your website footer can address legal concerns such as copyright, privacy policies, privacy regulations, etc.
- Search engine optimization (SEO). Your footer can be a place to include internal links to important pages on your site, which can help with on-page SEO.
With all that in mind, here are some elements that you should consider putting in our footer. You don‘t necessarily need to include all of them — the examples above don’t. But these are the elements that you should at least consider putting in your website footer.
Copyright Notice
While original content on your website is automatically copyrighted in most jurisdictions, it's still a good idea to include a copyright notice in your website footer because it alerts visitors to the fact that your original content is copyrighted and can help prevent infringement.
In a legal article on Nolo, Stephen Fishman, J.D. writes that a copyright notice is “a written notice stating that a particular work is protected by copyright and that you own that copyright.”
You can include the copyright notice anywhere on your site, but adding it in the website footer is by far the most common strategy that you'll see.
In your copyright notice, you should include the copyright symbol © (or the words “Copyright” or "Copr.”). You should also include the name of the copyright owner (e.g. your name or the name of your website), the year that your website was originally published, and the year of your website's most recent substantial update (typically the current year).
It‘s also acceptable to only include the year of the most recent substantial update. You’ll see a mix of both approaches between businesses.
For example, the copyright notice in the HubSpot website footer reads “Copyright © 2025 HubSpot, Inc.” while the Amazon example earlier in this post includes the original publication date as well and reads “© 1996-2025, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates”.
Privacy Policy Link
If you’re collecting personal data from users, such as their email addresses or payment information, then privacy policy agreements are mandatory by law.
For this reason, it’s essential to draft a legally compliant privacy policy and ensure it is easy to access on your website.
One of the most common places to put your privacy policy link is in your website footer. In fact, this is such a common placement that, at least personally, it‘s always the first place that I look if I want to see a website’s privacy policy.
You‘ll probably see this on 95% of the website footers that you look at, but here’s one specific example from Siete Foods, which has its privacy policy link in the footer of its website.
Other Links to Comply With Relevant Privacy Legislation
In addition to including a privacy policy link, you should also include links or content related to any other privacy legislation that your business needs to comply with. When in doubt, you should always contact a lawyer about your site's legal obligations.
Because of recent regulations, you‘ll see a lot of websites now include links to manage users’ data or cookie preferences in their footers, which can be important to comply with legislation such as Europe‘s GDPR and California’s CCPA.
For example, in the same Siete Foods example from the previous section, you can see that they also include a “Do Not Sell” link, which is a requirement of California's CCPA law.
Sitemap
While I think that most people are more familiar with the XML sitemap that you submit to search engines like Google, a sitemap can also be made with HTML and designed to help your human visitors navigate all of your site's content.
You can add a sitemap to your page footer in two ways:
- You can add lots of internal links to key pages on your site, which you'll see with a lot of software tools and online products (including the full HubSpot footer).
- You can provide a single link to a dedicated HTML sitemap page on your site.
The first approach is known as creating a “sitemap footer.” These footers contain navigation points that can’t neatly fit into the top-level or global navigation bars of the larger site.
There may also be navigation points that encourage visitors to browse the site.
For example, if you look at the full HubSpot website footer, you'll see that it includes lots of deep internal links to popular features and tools. These links are valuable, but there are too many of them to include directly in the primary navigation menu.
If you‘d rather just link to a dedicated HTML sitemap page, you’ll first need to create the HTML sitemap on your site, if you haven't done so already. Then, you can just link to that individual page in your website footer.
Apple kind of uses a hybrid approach. Apple does include a lot of relevant internal links, but the Apple website footer also includes a direct link to an even more detailed HTML sitemap at the very bottom.
Logo
If you have a more creative or playful brand, I think the website footer can be a great place to reinforce your logo in a slightly different way than the logo in your header.
There are a few approaches you can take:
- Increase the font size.
- Add an image.
- Include a mission statement or your brand values below the logo.
These are just a few ways you can remind visitors what your company stands for and make a memorable last impression.
I don't see this approach very often with more “traditional” brands. But I do see it with more youthful businesses that want to reinforce their playful branding.
For example, in the Mando footer example that I shared earlier, you can see how Mando includes a variation of its fox logo in the footer.
The header only includes the fox's face, but the footer gives the fox a body and tail as well.
Contact Information
Your footer can also be a great place to include your contact information.
For online businesses and consulting firms, this could just be your email address and phone number.
If you have an actual local business, I think that the website footer is a great place to reinforce NAP (name, address, and phone number), which is an important part of local SEO.
For example, you'll see pretty much every local law firm include strong NAP signals in their footers.
Here's an example from a Philadelphia firm.
Social Media Icons
Your website footer can also be a great place to promote your social media profiles. You can use it as the primary or secondary location, depending on how heavily you want to promote your social media presence.
If you go back to my Chipotle website footer example from before, you'll see that Chipotle includes a few different social media icons in the “Connect With Us” section of its footer.
Email Sign-up Form
If you have an email newsletter, putting your subscribe form in your website footer can be a great way to connect with readers who have fully engaged with your content.
Don‘t get me wrong — I don’t think you should put your only email subscribe form in your website footer. However, it can be a great secondary location that gives you another chance to connect with engaged visitors.
For example, you might have your primary email subscribe form display as a pop-up or in a different location above the fold. Then, you could have your footer be the secondary email subscribe form.
I've noticed this pattern to be especially popular with ecommerce stores, which typically have one email subscribe form displayed as a pop-up and another in the footer.
For example, look at how Liquid I.V. includes an email subscribe form on the right side of its website footer.
Footer Links
Footer links, also called boilerplate links, typically appear on almost every page of your website. They’re designed to help users navigate, especially if they can’t find what they’re looking for in your header, drop-down menus, or home page links.
I'll talk about these in a lot more detail in the next section.
Which Footer Links to Add for SEO
While there’s no standard set of footer links, here are some common options I think are a good idea to add to optimize on-page SEO for most websites.
About Us
This link takes visitors to your “About Us” page, where you can give the elevator pitch for your company and your mission statement.
With customers increasingly interested in why and how your business operates, along with what you make or sell, the About Us link is a solid footer addition.
If you have a personal portfolio, the “About” page will instead provide information about your personal background and skills.
If you need some inspiration, check out our collection of About Us and About Me page examples.
Contact Information
Regardless of what your website is about, I think that the footer should include a link to your Contact page at a bare minimum.
As I mentioned above, local businesses should include their full contact information in the website footer, as this can be a good way to reinforce NAP.
In addition to a link to the contact page, some businesses choose to also add a contact form directly in the footer.
Locations
If your business has multiple physical locations — such as stores in different areas or multiple offices — I think that it's a good idea to include a list of those locations in the footer.
Each list item can link to the dedicated page/website for that location.
Sitemap
If your site does have a dedicated HTML sitemap page, I definitely recommend including that in your website footer. Not only does this make it easy for human visitors to find, but it also makes sure Google discovers that page (which will further help Google crawl your website).
Privacy Policy
With regulations such as the CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, and others continually evolving, I think that it‘s absolutely essential to include a link to your privacy policy in your website’s footer.
This not only helps your visitors learn more about how you treat their data, but it can also help ensure that your website complies with rules for collection, storage, and disclosure.
Key Feature/Service Pages
If you're selling a product or services, you probably have pillar pages for key product features or services that you want your human visitors to notice and that you want to rank in Google.
I recommend including links to these pages in your website footer, especially if you can't fit links to all of them in your primary navigation menu.
Customer Reviews or Testimonials
If you have a dedicated page on your site to display customer reviews or testimonials, I recommend including a link to that page in your footer. It might help convince some users who are on the fence, which is definitely a worthy use of footer real estate.
Terms of Use
Will your Terms of Use see significant visitor volumes? No. Will they ever be read in their entirety? Probably not.
But are they necessary? Absolutely. While it won’t see much use, it’s important to include a Terms of Use link in case users have questions or legal challenges arise.
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How to Optimize Your Website Footer
While your website footer definitely isn‘t the most visible part of your website, I still think that it’s an essential part of your web design strategy.
In this section, I want to leverage my 10+ years of building websites to provide some tips on how to optimize your website footer.
1. Think about your links.
When I first built my freelance writing website, I didn’t give much thought to a footer, let alone footer links. The result was a site with limited functionality — if visitors didn’t find what they were looking for at first glance, there were no secondary options.
Other businesses take the opposite approach, adding 20, 30, 40, or more links to their footer. While this offers more information, the problem remains the same: It’s challenging for visitors to find relevant information.
To optimize your footer, think about your links. Unless you're going with a full product footer, aim for 5-10 if possible. Too few and your footer doesn’t offer much value. Too many and users will simply scroll past.
2. When in doubt, go small.
I don't think having a bigger footer is a bad thing, per se. However, you should never create a bigger footer “just because.”
That is, unless you have some specific reason to go big, I recommend keeping your footer small.
The bigger your footer, both in terms of website space and the number of links included, the more it distracts from the rest of your website.
Remember that a good footer isn’t the focus of your site — instead, it’s a way for users to find specific information that keeps them on your page.
Bigger footers also mean more maintenance and monitoring to ensure links are up-to-date and working as intended.
3. Use your website footer for SEO.
In my experience, the website footer can be a really valuable tool for on-page SEO, so I recommend leveraging it for this purpose as much as possible.
Creating a good experience for your human visitors should always be your first priority, but not using your footer for SEO at all is a missed opportunity.
Adding links to key pages on your site lets search engines know that those pages are important parts of your site, which can help them rank higher in results. It can also help Google gain more insights into the structure and content on your site.
For local SEO, your website footer can also play an important role in sending NAP signals to search engines.
4. Don’t forget your contact info (especially for local businesses).
I think that having clear contact information in the website footer is important for all websites, but it's especially important for local businesses as it sends NAP signals to Google and other search engines.
For physical locations, it's also a user-friendly touch to include a map link in the footer, as this will help visitors quickly access directions to your business.
If you also have multiple locations, I recommend trying to list each location in your footer, along with its associated phone number and email address. If you have 10+ locations, it might be difficult to include all of them — but whenever it's possible, try to get them all in the footer.
5. Get your legal housekeeping in order.
Your website footer can be a great place to cover a lot of legal housekeeping tasks that you might not want to put in more visible areas of your site.
While these legal details won‘t matter to the average human visitor, they’re still important to be visible and accessible. Adding them to your footer ensures that they'll be there on every page of your site.
By “legal housekeeping,” I mean the following elements:
- Copyright notices and information.
- Privacy policy.
- Terms and conditions.
- Relevant requirements for other legislation, such as a “Do not sell” option for CCPA or cookie management tools.
Your website or industry might also have its own unique compliance requirements that you can consider including in your website footer.
6. Consider adding a search box.
In my experience, there are two main reasons why a person might scroll all the way down to your footer:
- They‘ve been fully engaged with your content and moved the entire way from the top to the bottom — that’s great!
- They couldn‘t find what they were looking for at the top of the page so they’re hoping they might find it at the bottom.
Adding a search box to your website footer can help you address the second situation and give those visitors one last tool to find what they're looking for.
7. Add relevant awards or certifications.
Your website's footer can also be a great place to display any relevant awards or certifications, if you have them.
For example, if you’ve just won an award for service, quality, or value, highlight it in your footer to showcase your expertise.
Or, if you have some certification that proves the quality of your product/service against the competition, it's also a great idea to include that in your footer.
Pro tip: Often, the organizations awarding these accolades will provide you with a badge graphic to display on your website. Be sure to reach out to the organization to get this file.
8. Incorporate a call to action (CTA).
One more CTA may be just the thing that gets a user to do something. After all, they’ve made it all the way to the bottom of your site — that has to count for something, right?
By including a clear call-to-action in your footer — such as signing up for a newsletter, requesting a trial, or scheduling a demo — you can speak to the limited subset of users who made it all the way to the bottom of your site.
I want to make it clear that you should never make your website footer have the only CTA for what you want the visitor to do. But it is a great place to have one last chance to move the visitor to action.
9. Make it playful (but only if it fits your branding).
If I'm being honest, I think that most websites will be best served by a boring website footer. If you look at the website footer examples that I shared above, you might have noticed that a lot of them look the same.
There‘s a reason for that: it’s usually an area more focused on function over form.
However, if you have a creative and/or playful brand identity, I think the footer can be a great place to reinforce that identity. Because so many websites go the boring route, breaking the mold can really make your website stand out.
10. Be careful with your website footer if you use infinite scroll.
This last tip is more about how to avoid messing up your website footer rather than optimizing it, per se. However, it covers one of my biggest pet peeves in website design, so I think it's still worth sharing.
If you have a page on your site that uses infinite scroll, you should be careful about showing your footer on that page.
While displaying a footer sitewide is good for cohesiveness, I find it incredibly frustrating when I'm trying to interact with a website footer only to have it get pushed down each time more content automatically loads.
Website Footer Design FAQs
What should my website footer say?
Don’t overcomplicate it! At a minimum, your footer should include:
- About page link
- Contact information
- Location, if necessary
- Copyright
- Privacy policy link
- Terms of use link
- Links to any legal information you have to include based on your industry and location
Should a footer be on every page of a website?
In most situations, a footer should show up on every page. Like a menu, it enhances user experience by helping visitors navigate your website and find information they need.
Just be careful about how you display your website footer if you have pages that automatically load more content using infinite scroll.
Is a website footer important for SEO?
Your website footer does impact SEO, though the exact extent is debatable. Google has said remarkably little about it over the years, but the general advice in the SEO expert community is that including your most important internal links is a good thing.
“Footer SEO isn't dead,” says Smilja Pjesivac, SEO Manager at Swot Digital. “It's evolved into a strategic SEO and user experience asset. It acts as the executive summary of the website, tying together key elements like contact info, legal pages, and internal links.”
In your website footer, Pjesivac recommends linking to your site's most important pages using “descriptive anchor text.” She adds, “It should provide valuable internal links for search engines while remaining clean, intuitive, and easy for users to navigate.”
As for external links, avoid them in the footer, if possible. And if you must include them, be sure to “nofollow” footer external links.
In my own personal experience, I‘ve found that using sitewide links in my website footer to promote key pillar pages has been successful. However, as is always the case with SEO, that doesn’t guarantee that it will be successful for your website and it's always hard to pinpoint which specific SEO tactic “worked” because there are so many variables in play.
Create the perfect website footer today.
While your website footer certainly isn‘t the most exciting part of your website, I still think it’s an important element that you shouldn't overlook when designing your site.
If you implement your footer well, you can use it as a tool to enhance the user experience of human visitors to your site, while also leveraging it to improve your site's on-page SEO.
By design, it's not the first thing that your visitors will see — but it might just be the last thing they see. Use it to leave the right impression.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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- Tech Company Pages
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