Conversion
Above the fold
Above the fold is the part of a page visible without scrolling.
What is above the fold?
Above the fold is the part of a page visible without scrolling. The boundary varies by device and viewport, so it is a range rather than a line.
Why this is worth knowing
It determines what every visitor sees, which makes it the only part of the page guaranteed an audience.
What the work looks like
Designed with the primary action and the core proposition visible at common mobile viewport sizes, verified by scroll-depth data rather than by assumption.
The common misunderstanding
The belief that nobody scrolls is wrong and so is the belief that position does not matter. Scroll data shows the real distribution, which differs sharply by template.
Most disagreements about this turn out to be disagreements about the definition.
Where this comes up in the work
It is part of Lifecycle and Email, and more specifically of Email deliverability. Across the rest of the work it shows up in:
- Ecommerce SEO, which cannot be done properly without it
- Digital PR and Link Building, where it quietly limits how far finding the trade press nobody else in the category is bothering with can go
- Google Ads Management, where it decides finding the competitor bidding on the brand name and deciding whether to care
- Paid Social and Meta Ads, because matching the format to the intent rather than to what was easy to make depends on it
What to check
Two questions that establish whether this is actually in order on a given site:
- Whether the alert that should catch it reaches a person who can act
- Whether it is the same for a returning visitor as for a first-time one
Common questions
How would we know above the fold is a problem?
By measuring it rather than by argument. Designed with the primary action and the core proposition visible at common mobile viewport sizes, verified by scroll-depth data rather than by assumption.
Is above the fold just another name for something?
The belief that nobody scrolls is wrong and so is the belief that position does not matter. Scroll data shows the real distribution, which differs sharply by template.
Is above the fold a ranking factor?
It determines what every visitor sees, which makes it the only part of the page guaranteed an audience. Whether that becomes a ranking change depends on what else is true about the site, which is why it is worth measuring rather than assuming.
How do you check above the fold on a site?
Designed with the primary action and the core proposition visible at common mobile viewport sizes, verified by scroll-depth data rather than by assumption. Anybody with access can establish it in an afternoon. For the decision, Ecommerce SEO for SaaS and technology. For the implementation, Entity and Semantic SEO for SaaS and technology.
Whose job is above the fold?
It needs one named owner rather than a shared responsibility. The natural home is Entity and Semantic SEO, since keeping entity markup honest about what the business does and does not offer is where the consequence lands. If the brief is still open, Conversion Rate Optimization in Birmingham and Digital PR and Link Building in Birmingham are the two that change it most often.
Is above the fold expensive to get right?
The diagnosis is cheap. The fix ranges from an afternoon to a project depending on how deep it sits in the build, and we scope the second after doing the first. The short version is here. Multilingual and hreflang and Query intent mapping are the long ones.
Put the data in front of someone who reads it
Share the site and the target. We will say what we would check first and what we would leave alone.