Important Website Footer Elements
Almost every website has a footer. It can serve a variety of purposes for your website. From a little introductory text to terms and conditions, a footer’s content does it well. The content present in the footer may depend on the type of website you are running. Some elements in your footer may appear more effective than others. All it takes is experimentation and see what yields a good result. Regardless, you have all the freedom to add whatever content you want in the footer. In this article, we are going to look into some important elements you can have on your website’s footer.
1. The must-have Important Website Footer elements
As the title suggests, this section contains the must-have footer elements. We highly recommend not to overlook this list and add them to your website.
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Copyright Notice
The most important part of your footer. Every website should have its own copyright notice displayed. A copyright notice is a legal element that states all the work and content on the website is protected by copyright. And of course, it is to prevent others from copying or stealing content from your website. You need a copyright symbol ‘©’ or simply the words ‘Copyright’, followed by the entity’s name. Here, entity refers to your company and/or website’s name.
For example, take a look at our footer’s copyright section. We have added our company’s registration number and DUNS number along with the copyright.
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Privacy Policy
Like almost every website these days, Digital Lime Green also uses cookies. A cookie tracks and collects a user’s activity to improve the site’s performance and ad personalisation for visitors (if you are displaying ads). Furthermore, if you are collecting any kind of personal data such as email, name, or contact number, then you are required to declare your privacy policy by law. It is a good practice to link your privacy policy in the footer. Some websites also choose to declare an excerpt from their privacy policy.
In the below example, however, we have chosen to add the privacy policy link along with other legal links.
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Sitemap
A sitemap on the footer is a set of additional navigational links that you could not fit on the main navigation tab. These links may be less important than the main navigation tab, but important nonetheless. There are two important reasons for having a sitemap. Google or any search engine’s crawl bots look for a sitemap to index your site as effectively as possible. A well-defined sitemap will make it easier for the bots to index your website. Secondly, visitors to your website will have more content to explore. It will encourage users to explore more on your website.
A Sitemap looks like this. This is Digital Lime Green’s sitemap. It is the set of all the links we could not incorporate into our global navigation bar. The global navigation bar here refers to the menu bar or navigation bar that rests below the header of a website.
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Special: COVID-19 Helpline Link(s)
This is not exactly a ‘must-have’, but it would be better to have one. Allow your visitors to have an insight into Covid situations happening in South Africa. Furthermore, it will also help the visitors to have access to emergency helpline numbers at ease. It’s a good practice in this ongoing pandemic. For South Africa, you can get Covid related information on the SA Coronavirus Government website.
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Contact Information
Easily available contact information on the footer will help visitors to connect with you immediately. Some websites only opt-in for including a link for a contact form but the majority follows adding contact information such as contact number, email, and address. For example, we have added a ‘Contact Us‘ link (along with a FAQ section) on our footer as well. It will lead you to our contact form. You can see that in our sitemap image above.
2. Other Important Website Footer Elements
In this section, we are going to see additional footer elements that you can add. These footer elements shall or shall not be considered depending on the type of website you are running. Remember to ask yourself these questions before you add an element given below:
- Is it going to contribute anything to the user experience?
- Is it going to make my footer look crowded?
- What kind of goal do I want to achieve with this footer element?
If you can answer the above questions, feel free and experiment around!
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Logo and Branding
Adding your logo and company’s name in the footer is also a common practice observed around the internet. Not only it makes your website look good but also helps with raising brand awareness. You can follow different practices by presenting your logo in the footer. You can keep it different from the header, add a good image, different font sizes, and so on. Furthermore, you can also include a line or two about your business, a slogan, or your mission.
Keep your users engaged and constantly remind them what your business is all about. For example, take a look at Expatica‘s footer. They have added their logo, name, and slogan on the footer: ‘Live. Work. Love.’.
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Social Media Links
Got a social media presence? There’s no better place to boast about it than your footer. You can incorporate social media icons on the footer. Whoever’s interested in knowing more about your business can click those buttons and explore more. It will also help in increasing the overall awareness of your brand and business. In the above example, you can also see that Expatica has added their social media buttons.
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Call-to-Action buttons
Call-to-actions on your footer can prompt visitors to try out your services, subscribe to your newsletter, donate, and much more. If you are looking forward to increasing the conversion rate on your website, a call-to-action button on your footer would help you out.
For example, take a look at Britannica‘s footer. They have a call-to-action for subscribing to their newsletter.
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News Updates and Latest Articles
If you are into blog writing, content marketing, or writing news articles, adding this feature in the footer would be useful. Visitors can simply navigate to the footer and see the latest articles and news updated on your website. Alternatively, you can also choose to ‘feature’ a few of your articles instead.
Some good Website Footer examples
South Africa Venues is a website for tourists in South Africa. Their website footer is especially remarkable for us because of the ‘Why Book with Us?’ section. It has a good chance of converting visitors into customers by providing them with the benefits of booking with them. Apart from that, you can also see the type of payment methods they accept. You land on their homepage and you have all the need-to-know information right there.
Xneelo has a simple, straight to the point website footer that is completely dedicated to a very organised sitemap. You can see how organised and pleasant it looks. It has all the necessary links you need to traverse around the website. An organised website footer like this is most favoured by index bots and hence, worth mentioning here.
Marble Restaurant has a great footer that includes a star testimony, gallery, contact information, and social media. What’s more? They have also advertised their sister restaurant. Lastly, at the very bottom, they have a WhatsApp message button along with the payment methods they accept. We feel that this is a perfect footer for a restaurant website design as it provides all the necessary information right at the bottom.
Conclusion
As you can see above, a footer design changes accordingly with respect to the type of business you are running. Hopefully, we have covered everything in this article about the important elements you can add to your website’s footer. Do you have any more suggestions? Feel free to let us know.
Digital Lime Green provides quality footer designs along with many other features with our Website Design Package. Feel free to contact us anytime! We provide quality solutions to your queries and problems at affordable prices in Cape Town, South Africa.
To know more about our services, take a look here.
Wishing you all the best!