---
title: A footer that fits the page
url: https://namegarage.com/blog/a-footer-that-fits-the-page
author: Namegarage
date: '2026-09-10'
description: The footer used to run the full width of the window while everything
  above it stopped at the text column, and on a phone its fourteen links stacked into
  a tower taller than most of what they sat under. It is two short rows now, aligned
  with the page, and every link in it is big enough to hit with a thumb.
---

# A footer that fits the page

Nobody arrives at a sales site to read the footer. But it is where the
terms live, and the privacy policy, and the control that changes your
cookie choice — so when you do go looking, it should be easy to find and
easy to hit. Ours was neither.

## One line, too wide

Every part of a domain page stops at a comfortable reading column. The
footer did not. It had been built to fill whatever width the window
offered, so on a wide screen it stretched to about 1,480 pixels under a
page that stopped at 1,000 — the one strip of the site that did not line
up with anything above it.

What filled that width was a single run-on line of fourteen items: four
navigation links, two legal documents, our name, six social profiles and
the cookie control, all separated by the same small dot. Finding "Privacy"
in it meant reading a sentence of links to the end.

On a phone it went the other way. Below a certain width the whole row
switched to stacking one item per line, which turned those fourteen items
into a column roughly 350 pixels tall — on many pages, taller than the
content it was supposed to be a footnote to.

## Two rows instead

The footer is now two short rows, and it stops where the page stops.

The first row is where you can go: the catalogue, the blog, the referral
programme, the Terms of Sale, the privacy policy, and the cookie control.
The second, under a thin rule, is who we are: our name and the places you
can follow us.

That split is the whole idea. Six social profiles inline with the
navigation is what made the old line a run-on, and they were never
navigation in the first place — they are identity, and they belong under a
rule rather than in the middle of a sentence about where to click next.

Both rows wrap now instead of stacking, so on a phone the same footer is
about 155 pixels tall rather than 350. The dots between links stayed:
once a row wraps, they are what tells one link from the next.

The social links keep their names next to their marks. An icon-only row
would have been narrower, and we would have been trading away the only
label that still works when an image fails to load or when someone cannot
tell six small monochrome glyphs apart. That is not a good trade for a few
hundred pixels.

## Big enough to hit

The links in a footer are small by convention, and small is fine until it
means "hard to tap". The accessibility guidelines put a floor on this:
WCAG 2.2 asks that a target be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels unless it sits
inside a run of ordinary prose. Ours rendered a little over 20 pixels tall
and did not sit inside prose — they sat in a wrapping row of links, which
is exactly the case the exception is not written for.

Every link and button in the footer now clears that floor. Nothing looks
different; there is simply more of each one to hit.

## A smaller thing, for screen readers

A page can mark a region as navigation, and assistive software uses those
marks to jump straight to it. Ours had marked the whole footer that way,
social profiles and all — so a reader jumping to "footer navigation" also
landed among six links that go to other websites, and among a link to the
home page that the row above already offered.

The mark now covers the first row only. The identity row is still there,
still in the footer, just no longer announced as somewhere to navigate.

## The same footer everywhere

The footer used to be written out by hand in each page template. Nine
copies, and — as tends to happen with nine copies — they had quietly
drifted into three different orderings, and at one point some of them were
missing a link the others had. It is generated from one place now, so
every page carries the same one, and a page that forgets it fails our
build rather than shipping short.

None of this changes a price, a listing, or how an offer reaches us. It is
the kind of work that is only visible when it has not been done.