How Long Should Your Web Page Be?

Conventional wisdom says that you should not make any page longer than one screenful of text, because readers hate to scroll down. In fact, there's even a term for content that is outside of that first screen—below the fold. Some designers believe that content that is below that fold might as well not exist for most readers. However, this opinion only expresses a preference, not a fact or best practice of web design.

Scrolling Isn't the Only Thing That Hides Information

The most common argument against writing long pages is that readers may never even see it. But putting that information on another page altogether hides it even more effectively. Multi-page articles see a drop off of around 50 percent for every page after the first one. In other words, if 100 people hit the first page of an article, 50 make it to the second page, 25 to the third, and 10 to the fourth, and so on. And in fact, the drop off is much more severe after the second page (something like 85 percent of the original readers never make it to the third page of an article).

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What Should the Width of Your Web Page Be?

By Jennifer Kyrnin

When a page is long, there is a visual cue for the reader in the form of the scroll bar on the right side of their browser. Most web browsers change the length of the internal scroll bar to indicate how long the document is and how much more is left to scroll. While most readers won't consciously see that, it provides information to let them know that there's more on the page than they immediately see. But when you create short pages and links to subsequent pages, there is no visual information to tell them how long the article is. In fact, expecting your readers to click links is asking them to take a leap of faith that you're really going to provide more information on that next page that they will value. When it's all on one page, they can scan the entire page, and find the parts that are of interest.

Some Things Block Scrolling

If you have a long web page that you want people to scroll through, avoid scroll blockers. These are visual elements of your web page that imply that the page content is over. These include elements like:

• horizontal lines
• lines of text links
• short, wide graphics (especially ones that are around 468x60—a standard ad unit size)
• navigation icons or social media links

Basically, anything that acts as a horizontal line across the entire width of the content area can act as a scrolling block, including images or multimedia.

So How Long Should a Web Page Be?

Ultimately, it depends upon your audience. Children don't have as long an attention span as adults, and some topics work better in longer segments. But a good rule of thumb is: No article should exceed two printed pages of double-spaced, 12-point text.

And that would be a long web page. But if the content merited it, putting it all on one page would be preferable to forcing your readers to click through to subsequent pages.