The page fold exists. It influences users’ behaviour. And it needs to be considered.

What is the Page Fold?

The page fold is a classic case of a widely agreed upon print design phenomenon that was adopted early on by web designers, as it was assumed to hold true in their discipline. The principle is simple – newspapers folded on a newspaper stand have only the top half of their page visible to the passer by, so if you want a headline to grab attention it must be ‘above the fold’.

Clearly, a rule in one design discipline does not necessarily apply in another. After all, it takes far less motivation on the part of the user to scroll a web page than it does to pick up a newspaper from a news stand and unfold it. But we have to remember that in the early days of the web, designers and users alike were unfamiliar with the medium, and it made sense to adopt tried and trusted principles from other areas of design.

And so the idea persisted, with designers often cramming as much content as possible ‘above the fold’, afraid that anything below it would be likely to be missed by the user.

Page Fold – Myth or Reality?

But although this idea of page fold as significant barrier has been rightly debunked in articles such as ‘Myth of the Page Fold’, too many people are now rallying behind a cry of “There is no page fold!” as blindly and unthinkingly as those that promoted the idea of the fold in the first place.

To begin with, dismissing the fold is to dismiss not a myth, but a simple observable fact – that some content is visible in the user’s browser when a page loads, while some content isn’t.

And this fact has consequences.

For example, content above the fold is essential in forming a user’s initial, split-second impression of a page, which can be formed in as little as 50 milliseconds (‘Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye’). If a user isn’t instantly convinced by a page, then they may not wait for the page to finish loading, let alone scroll down the page to explore further.

That doesn’t mean cramming content above the fold (if anything it means keeping things as simple and focussed as possible), but it does mean that the area above the fold has to work hard to be visually engaging.

The question of course is ‘where is the page fold?’ – the answer to which is that could be pretty much anywhere. With the enormous range of platforms and devices on which we view web content these days, it is impossible to know how much of a page’s content is visible above the fold.

But just because something is elusive, that doesn’t mean we should stop considering it. In fact, I’d argue that we should now be thinking about the page fold more, as it is manifesting itself in ever more nuanced and interesting ways.

The New Page Fold

Starting up Safari the other day I was struck by how much the Top Sites layout resembles a newspaper stand. The more I looked at it, the more I saw similarities, most significantly the fact that, for each website, Safari was showing me only the content above a ‘page fold’.

The reason this is significant is because the thumbnails are not static images, but continually updating representations of actual content. When I launch Safari I get an overview of the actual content of my bookmarked sites. If something catches my eye, I click on the thumbnail to open up the site. But in order for something to catch my eye, it has to be ‘above the fold’.

Take the example of ‘Typography Served’, the site shown in the upper left thumbnail. There are six rows of images on the website, but the thumbnail in Top Sites shows only the first of those rows. If an item of content isn’t in that top row, then it isn’t going to catch my eye, and isn’t going to be explored.

Yes, I can open the site to see what is ‘below the fold’, but that requires an additional level of engagement, much the same as lifting a newspaper off a news stand does. I don’t do it.

An example of how the phenomenon of the fold still influences how we engage with content, and as the ways in which we experience web content diversifies and evolves, it is starting to manifest itself in all kinds of ways that we have not foreseen.