A short guide to above-the-fold content

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Everything we would tell a client about above-the-fold content in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What is actually at stake

Visitors decide in seconds whether to keep scrolling. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

How we handle it

Say what you do before you say how special you are. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Where it usually goes wrong

The fold is a range, not a line, so do not cram. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

In practice

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about above-the-fold content before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The fold is a range, not a line, so do not cram — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.