Design, UI, UX, Inspiration, Web Development
Website Footer Design: Best Practices, Tips and Many Examples
The footer is that one small section on the bottom of your website that contains all the useful information that isn’t included in the primary content. In most cases, visitors will scroll all the way down to find the links they can’t locate anywhere else. This includes helpful navigation, policies, contact information, social media links, job opportunities, and more. In short, your website footer has two main purposes: it marks the end of the page, giving the visitor a full and familiar experience; and it features the logical conclusion of your website: means for the visitors to contact you easily.
One of the main advantages of the website footer is that everyone knows where to look for it and they will. This is why it needs to provide consistent, familiar, and usable UX for the visitors, organize all the relevant information, and present it efficiently and in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Without further ado, let’s dive right into the topic and look through the best practices for designing a website footer., with many examples from live websites.
9 Best Practices for Website Footer Design
The website footer is not a sitemap or a catch-all where the entire website content is squeezed into titles in columns. It’s in fact the last section where you can leverage a secondary call to action, convince your visitors of your expertise, drive engagement by linking to your social media, and much more. There are a few proven practices for website footers that can turn the small shy section on the bottom of the page into a powerful conversion tool.
Anderson Bros Design and Supply Website Footer
1. Pay Special Attention to your Links
Your links should always be working, accurate, and updated. In addition, if you link to an internal page unrelated to the primary content or an external page, make sure the link opens it in a new tab.
2. Optimize your Footer for Mobile
In some cases, you will need a big footer where you’ll organize a handful of necessary links. This is easy to do for desktop as you can group your links into categories, place them in colons, and make good use of so much space. For mobile, however, very wide footers with that much information translate into lots of scrolling and frustration for the users. This is why include only the most necessary links for the mobile version and make it compact.
3. Use Short and Precise Titles
The title of each link should immediately show what the respective page is about before the user clicks it. To do that, use very short descriptive and unambiguous phrases such as Terms of Use, Contacts, FAQ, About, Sitemap, Privacy, Help center, Mission, Values, Contribute, Join the Cause, etc.
4. Make it Consistent with the Page
Even with a very complex dynamic and interactive website design, it’s best to keep your footer as simple and readable as possible. Here comes the fun part: you have the freedom of creativity to make the transition from a complex page to a simple footer through any means you seem fit. You can achieve it with colors, shapes, and other visual elements. In the following example, the designer solved that with animation: all shapes that you can find on the background while scrolling the page, unhooked themselves, and fell in the footer. Pretty effective, keeping the consistency of the design without breaking the footer’s minimalism. It makes the footer not only a part of the visual journey but also its logical conclusion.
5. Highlight the Key Links
Your key information about your business, company values, company address, social media links, key resource pages, help guides, tutorials, and everything that the visitors can’t find elsewhere, should be highlighted in the footer.
6. Don’t Underestimate the SEO Possibilities
Google will always prioritize your main content and the header, however, you can use your footer to assist your deepest pages and increase your SEO authority.
7. Include One Last CTA
By the time your visitors reach your footer,m they are already familiar with your content or services. This one last CTA in your footer is a great conversion tool for them to subscribe to your services, newsletter, or contact you, so don’t deprive your design of that opportunity.
Defy the Current Website Footer
8. Add Your Legal Info
If they need it, visitors will look for your legal info within your industry, privacy policy, cookie policy, terms of service, and licenses in your website footer. They will expect it to be there.
9. Don’t Shy Away from Including Social Proof and Trust Elements
Make sure your visitors see the links for completed projects, awards, certificates, or any other kind of achievement. These are the elements that build trust and convince in your expertise.
30 Real-Life Examples of Effective Website Footers
The best practices aside, nothing gives us more knowledge and insight than learning from other creators and taking inspiration from their work. Let’s look at these website footers and see what valuable design tips we can get.
1. Wild Souls with Wild Statements
This website belongs to a small shop for wild and natural seeds and nuts products. Its entire aesthetics translates the shop’s philosophy for creating a new mentality: adoration for wild nature and everything that lives in it, rebellious attitude, and bold statements. Concluding in the footer, the design offers the key information, final CTA, and carousel animation of eye-catching rebellious brand visuals that keep the consistency of the overall design.
2. Superfluid Brutalism
Superfluid Studio Website Footer
If the overall design style for the website is brutalist, make the best out of it in the footer. In this case, the beauty shop Superfluid embraces the brutalist trend to the fullest and makes the final touches with a giant brand logo that takes half of the footer. It features all essential links like shipping and payment info, legal, FAQ, and socials, and highlights the shipping information with a carousel to drive the attention towards the CTA.
3. Plus with Bold Titles and Vibrant Colors
Clean With Plus Website Footer
This website strikes with bold, colorful engaging design and doesn’t fail to deliver it till the very end. The giant red footer drives instant attention and is still well organized and highlights only the key information. The contact section in the middle takes a central position as a main converting element.
4. Interactive Shapes and Minimalism
A smaller footer in contrast to the previous brutalist examples. Here we have a very clean almost minimalistic website footer design with four main segments for the viewer to choose from. The segments are visualized as four interactive shapes with smooth hover animation.
5. High Contrast on Friesday with Fun CTA Interaction
This footer is clean and minimalistic and completes the overall sticker design. In the center, the CTA right above the company’s address offers a fun hover interaction.
6. High Contrast in Black and White
Although this website alternates the colors of each section, it leaves the black and white for last that continues in the footer. It’s very well structured by categories, with big all-caps font and a nice animated carousel in the bottom. It has the magic to turn complexity into simplicity.
7. Structure with Colors
Overpass Studio Website Footer
Overpass is a platform that helps hire sales experts and maintain customer relationships from anywhere in the world. Being that, the platform’s website is data-heavy with a huge amount of deep pages. In the website footer, the visitors can access each important page in a perfectly structured and easy-to-scan design, all in categories, separated by contrasting colors.
8. Brutalist Boxes and Easy Access
Castor & Pollux Group Website Footer
This huge website footer uses text hierarchy well to highlight the most important pages inboxes. Their address takes the biggest part of the footer with lots of white space to lead the visitor’s attention to the interactive shape, while the categories for the company come next, and the legal and policies last.
9. Fun CTA and lots of White Space
This interactive website with engaging transition and animations on scroll gives an entire screen for the footer to use the white space to its advantage. Here we have a huge section for contact, bold social media links, the company address, and a little surprise when you hover over the cat pun.
10. Short and On Point
With this website, there’s only the most necessary info, taking little space at the bottom. The footer offers the socials, policies, and FAQ in two small columns with big readable fonts. Short, simple, and on point.
11. One Highlighted Element
After a very satisfying scroll through this creator’s portfolio, the website minimizes in a cool transition and reveals a simple black and white minimalistic footer that highlights the contact email. It is what the creator wants you to see and makes sure the other featured links don’t get in the way at all.
12. Small Amount of Info in the Corner
This designer bets on huge images and fonts to give more scroll and interaction to their page. In this case, as the number of pages is small, they cleverly used the space for visuals, while the information is sent to the right corner, easy to see and access.
13. Movie Poster Credits Style
Descubre Cevitxef Bilbao Website Footer
This restaurant uses its modern city aesthetics to its advantage to make the footer an important part of its web design. All the information such as opening hours, takeaway option, address, contacts, and socials is there in separate movie poster credits style boxes with neon hover colors.
14. Fighting Bad Boys with Good Website Footer Design
Bad Boys Official Website Footer
After the cool retro image of the main character, the Bad Boys Movie official website ends with two main sections. The one on the left has the CTA that the visitor will easily see thanks to the attention-grabbing giant animated logo. On the right, it has satisfyingly arranged 9 pages into 3 columns with the same width and the proof of authenticity below.
15. Not Entirely at the Bottom
Simpson Motorcycle Helmets EU Website Footer
Simpson Motorcycle has a neat footer with one interesting element that differs it from other similar footer design pieces. It doesn’t stay at the bottom. Leaving enough white space gives more freedom for the visitor to scroll and the illusion that the experience isn’t over. In simpler terms, it looks cool.
16. Stylish, Clean, and Perfectly Structured
The Provincial Hotel Ballarat Website Footer
In this case, we don’t have a fancy animation or interesting hovers. The Hotel Ballart website footer is clean and classy with its signature dark blue with great contrast over the light background color and uses its space to feature a logo, address, all-important links logically sorted into categories, and the two important for the hotel CTA options.
17. Naming the Categories
Essential Gourmet Website Footer
We’ve chosen this example for its decision to name the links categories. It’s very useful and convenient for the visitors.
18. Slick Corporate Design and the Essentials
The main focus of the three-part footer is the CTA section that starts with a question before the animation reveals the form and the button. Pretty nice way to emphasize the key goal of the page. The other essentials, such as contacts and socials go next and are very easy to access due to a lot of white space.
19. Part of the Last Section With Clever Typography Design
This inspirational website footer takes consistency even further as it becomes part of the last section. The title cleverly mimics the circular shape of the images, highlighting the key categories, policies, and contacts.
20. Little Text Taking the Entire Screen
One really can’t miss the key elements of the footer if they are very few and take the entire screen. Minimalism works great here as the main categories are giant, in the center, and instantly accessible. In terms of consistency, the footer uses the brand color scheme to its advantage to make a high contrast and add its accent blue as a hover color.
21. The Footer is the Contact Section
The main purpose of a portfolio and the place where it should all lead is the contact option. Here every page ends up with a contact section instead of a footer.
22. Highlighting the Footer with Hidden Interaction
At first glance, the footer is merged with the black background of the page. However, when you hover around, a gallery animation highlights the shape of the footer and makes it very effective. In terms of content, it offers the minimum and most essential: the four main pages, policies, blog, and email.
23. Say Hi!
Violeta Digital Craft Website Footer
This two-part footer has a main contact section with CTA and awesome background animations and all socials centered below. The content hierarchy ends with agency information links at the bottom in a smaller font.
24. Straight to the Point
This website footer includes just the address, socials, and careers, but makes sure to lead your attention straight to the point where you can’t miss the giant brutalist style CTA. A logical conclusion of scrolling each page.
25. Eccentric Luxury for Design Consistency
The best way to make your website footer stand out is to make it different and break the standard. This luxurious website does just this with a very interesting decision to center the footer content in a small rectangle. And the best part- everything you might need is still there: FAQ, values, socials, blog, press, contacts, and policies. Less is more in action.
26. Left Alignment and Lots of Space
Patrick Mahomes Website Footer
This footer has 3 parts: CTA and links on the left, and a high-quality image on the right. The latter pushes the attention to the left where the visitor pays attention to the bigger size titles first. Its main purpose is to call for signing for updates.
27. The Credits
Evolution of Stock Photography Website Footer
This is one of the cases where it’s hard to reach the footer if you’re not willing to go through the entire page experience. With this in mind, there isn’t anything essential that a visitor could need instant access to when landing on the page. The footer takes an entire screen and plays the role of credits screen, giving sources for the images used in the presentation, social media links, and a nice interactive brush in the background.
28. Text Hierarchy to the Extreme
Ajeeb’s website is a perfect example of a trendy website that has it all: brutalism, Riso print style, neon color effects, interactions, glitches, holographic images. And it still manages to keep it clean. The footer takes the entire screen with giant titles that highlight the main pages and contact info. Everything that isn’t as important goes at the bottom with significantly smaller text.
29. Less is More but the Hover Animations are the Most
The hover animation of your pointer follows you through your entire experience while scrolling down the page. However, it keeps the best part for the footer where your pointer breaks the titles and might make you play around with the effects before you even start reading them. Modern interactive UX done right.
30. Great Content Writing Game to the Very End
This website branded as Something Good is consistent in its message to the very end of its pages. What makes it so interesting as a good website footer example is that it doesn’t emphasize the contacts or links, but its message with a title animation, changing the adjectives to make its statements more powerful. In this case, the footer is a tool to strengthen the message.
Honorable Mentions
And last, let’s look at 5 more website footer examples for more inspiration and ideas.
Here the footer isn’t the last section of the page, as it reveals an inspirational quote to strengthen the agency’s message.
Lorelei Sorrento Website Footer
Another example of design consistency with the overall design and great content structure. Since the website has sticky vertical navigation, it can afford to distribute more key information and categories between the navigation and the footer.
Bellevue Syrene Website Footer
This website does a similar thing but without a dropdown menu in the navigation. Once a visitor reaches the footer, all information is available from both elements as one completed site map and makes it easy to scan.
Short and sweet website footer with as least links as possible, highlighted by beautiful visuals.
Compress Image Io Website Footer
And last, an illustration footer. This website is dedicated to image compression and has all relevant actions and information on the page. Rather than using the footer for extra links, it adds the creator’s credits and a beautiful colorful illustration.
In Conclusion
These were the 30 (+5 bonus) website footer examples for inspiration. After enjoying these effective designs, here are some tips and ideas we can gather from them.
- Replicate your main navigation in the footer if you have long pages: It’s very useful for your visitors to find quick access to your pages after scrolling through a long page. This way they won’t need to scroll all the way to the top in order to find what they’re looking for.
- Emphasize your main element boldly: You can use significantly bigger fonts to highlight your most important link, especially if your website sports brutalist design.
- Use animations to gain attention: A simple non-interactive animation can lead the visitor’s attention to a certain part of the footer.
- Hover Effects keep the footer design engaging: UX animations help your footer become a part of the whole experience and not just that boring section at the bottom.
- Visual and Text Hierarchy: You can easily help your visitors figure out different categories by importance if you boldly use text and visual hierarchy.
- Any section can become a footer: If you have anything displayed in the header you can use your footer to end each page with something else: contacts, credits, or inspirational quotes.
And most importantly, think outside the box
Play with alignments, shapes, and colors. Your footer can merge with the design not even looking like a footer, or it can become an unfamiliar experience for the visitor to unveil.
In the meantime, why not have a look at some more inspirational and insightful articles on the topic of UI/UX design: