What is below the fold?
On a newspaper the fold is a physical crease, and the stories above it are the ones chosen to sell the paper. On a screen the fold is the bottom edge of whatever is visible when a page first loads, before anyone scrolls. Everything beneath that edge is below the fold. The difference is that a screen's fold moves. A phone held upright, a laptop, a wide monitor and a tablet turned sideways all put it in a different place, so there is no single line, only a range.
Above the fold is where the first impression is made: the headline, the hero image or film, the first call to action. Below it lives the rest: the explanation, the proof, the details, the secondary actions, the footer. The design question is not whether content below the fold matters, because it does, but what has to be visible before a visitor decides whether to keep going.
Search engines treat the two differently in small ways. Google has long penalized pages that push the real content below a wall of advertising, and its page speed measurements focus on how quickly the largest visible element loads. Content below the fold is indexed and ranked like any other; it is simply expected to load after the part people see first.
Why it matters
Why below the fold matters
The fold is where attention is decided. Studies of how people read screens show attention concentrated in the first view and declining as they scroll, which is why the first screen has to say what the page is, who it is for and what to do. But people do scroll, almost universally on phones, and a page that treats the first screen as the only screen ends up cramming everything into it and saying nothing well.
It also matters for performance. The browser should load what is visible first and the rest as the visitor approaches it, which is what lazy loading does for images and video below the fold. Get it right and the page feels instant; get it wrong, by lazy loading the hero image or by loading every asset at once, and the page feels slow in a way that search engines now measure and visitors feel.
For conversion the fold is a hinge. The primary call to action is usually above it, repeated below, and the proof that persuades someone to act is often in the lower half of the page, where the people who were not yet convinced went looking for a reason.
In practice
How below the fold works in practice
- 01
Design starts with the smallest screen, because on a phone the fold is high and the first view is small. The first screen gets one job: a headline, a visual and an action, with enough of the next section showing to make it clear there is more. Visual cues, such as a section edge or a heading cut by the screen bottom, tell the visitor to scroll. Then the page is structured as a sequence, each section answering the question the previous one raised.
- 02
Below the fold, images and embedded films are lazy loaded, the hero is not, and the largest visible element is prioritized so the first view paints quickly. Scroll depth is measured in analytics to see how far people actually go, and calls to action are tested in more than one position. Designers avoid the false bottom, where a section ends with a hard edge and empty space, so the visitor believes the page has finished when it has not.
Watch out
What people get wrong about below the fold
Cramming everything above the fold, so the first screen is a wall and nothing is clear. Believing content below the fold does not count, for readers or for search, when the detail and the proof live there. Lazy loading the hero image, which delays the one thing that should appear first. Designing for a single fold, usually the designer's own monitor, when most visitors are on phones. And leaving a false bottom, so the visitor leaves before reaching the section that would have persuaded them.
The underlying error is treating the fold as a wall rather than a doorway. The first screen's job is to make the second one worth scrolling to.
