Why We Need to Stop Talking About the Fold

Every web designer has been there. The client, armed with advice from a 2008 marketing book, leans in and says: “We need all the key information visible immediately. People don’t scroll down websites.”

It sounds reasonable. It carries the weight of publishing history. And it has been leading website decisions astray for over twenty years.

Time to end this conversation.

A Print Concept That Lost Its Meaning

“Above the fold” describes how newspapers work. Folded in half on the stand, the top section gets seen first. The bottom section stays hidden until someone picks it up and opens it.

Web designers borrowed this idea in the late 1990s because they had to. Screens were small. Resolutions were fixed at 640×480. Browsers took up huge chunks of the viewport. You were working with maybe 400 pixels of height. Prioritizing what showed up first was simply dealing with reality.

But that reality ended in 1998. The web has changed just a bit since then.

The Study That Won’t Die

Nielsen Norman Group’s early research on scrolling still gets misquoted today. “Users don’t scroll” became the popular takeaway. What they actually found: users scroll constantly—when the page gives them a reason.

That difference is crucial.

A 2018 NN/g study found mobile users scroll 57% of the time. Chartbeat looked at 25 million sessions and found that serious attention happens below the fold—not above it. The data keeps telling us the same story, but the myth persists.

Mobile traffic seals the argument. In 2026, phones and tablets drive the majority of web visits. On a mobile screen, the fold concept is meaningless. Every page is a scrolling experience. Every web designer building mobile-first—which should be everyone—already works in a world where the fold doesn’t exist.

What Really Keeps Users Engaged

Here’s what the research actually shows: people make instant decisions about whether a page is worth their time. That decision happens based on what they see first. But “worth my time” doesn’t mean “shows me everything at once.” It means the page quickly signals value, clarity, and relevance.

This is a completely different design challenge than stuffing content above some invisible line.

A professional web design agency understands this distinction. The goal isn’t cramming everything into the first screen. It’s making that first screen do one specific job: tell people what this page is about and why they should stay. Clear headlines. Focused value statements. Visual hierarchy that feels intentional. Those things earn the scroll.

What actually hurts engagement is the “false bottom”—a big image, a heavy banner, or awkward spacing that makes users think the page ends. That’s a real UX problem.

But the fix is designing better continuation cues, not eliminating scrolling.

The Technical Reality

There’s a technical angle that web designers need to know: Core Web Vitals.

Google now factors Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) into rankings—how fast the main content loads and becomes visible. This is Google’s nod to “above the fold,” but for speed reasons, not because of some engagement rule. Slow-loading top sections create bad user experiences.

So yes, what loads first matters for performance. Heavy images, blocking scripts, and oversized hero videos up top will hurt your LCP and your rankings. A web design agency that doesn’t optimize for this is leaving search visibility on the table.

But this is about loading speed, not fold position. You fix it by compressing assets, using modern formats, and deferring non-critical scripts. Not by jamming a dozen calls-to-action into 600 pixels.

How Good Design Actually Works

The shift in how smart web designers think about page structure:

• Set the stage, don’t tell the whole story. The first screen answers “what is this?” quickly. It doesn’t try to be everything.

• Create scroll momentum. Good design establishes rhythm that pulls users down. Visual weight, whitespace, and content chunking all help. Pages that breathe get scrolled.

• Match the layout to the goal. A landing page for paid traffic has different needs than a blog post or product category page. The “fold” matters differently in each context. A website designer doing conversion work treats these as separate problems with separate solutions.

• Design for thumbs, not mice. Thumb scrolling, swipe gestures, and tap targets change how content works. Above-the-fold thinking came from desktop. Mobile-first design makes it largely irrelevant.

The Better Question

When a client asks “is this above the fold?” what they’re really asking is: “Will people engage with this and take action?”

If the answer is yes, fold position doesn’t matter. People will scroll because the page is working.

If the answer is no, moving content up won’t fix it. A confusing page doesn’t become clear because you pushed things higher. It just becomes a confusing page that shows up sooner.

Web designers have known this for years. The best ones stopped designing to a fold long ago and started designing to actual user behavior—what people really do, not what a 1998 assumption said they’d do.

The Bottom Line

Above-the-fold still matters for a few things: first impressions, load performance, and LCP scores. Those are real concerns.

But the idea that content below the fold is wasted, or that users won’t scroll unless forced? That’s the myth. And in 2026, with mobile interfaces built for scrolling, long-form content everywhere, and data that keeps proving it wrong, it’s time to stop letting this drive how we structure pages.

Build for clarity. Build for momentum. Build for user intent.

The fold will take care of itself.