What is the first fold of a website, and why does it decide everything?

Why does the top of the page get the attention?

Nielsen Norman Group’s eye-tracking research measured where people actually look. In their 2018 study, users spent 57 percent of their page-viewing time above the fold, and 74 percent of it within the first two screenfuls (Nielsen Norman Group). The 2010 study had put the above-the-fold share at 80 percent, so people do scroll more than they did. The shape of the curve has not changed: attention falls off a cliff at the fold and keeps falling.

For a business website the implication is blunt. Whatever you put in the first screen is what most visitors will judge you on. Whatever you put at the bottom, most of them will never see.

Why does it have to load fast?

The first fold is also the first thing to load, and on a phone it is often the only thing that loads before the visitor decides. Google’s research found that 53 percent of mobile site visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load (Google). A study Google commissioned from Deloitte across 37 brands found that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile speed lifted retail conversions by 8 percent and lead-generation page views by 7 percent (Milliseconds make millions).

Google now measures this with three Core Web Vitals, and the one that matters most for the first fold is Largest Contentful Paint: the moment the biggest element on screen, usually the headline or the hero image, has appeared. The threshold for “good” is 2.5 seconds (web.dev). As of the 2024 Web Almanac, 43 percent of mobile sites pass all three vitals (HTTP Archive). Most business websites are in the other 57 percent, and most of their owners do not know it.

What goes in a first fold?

Four things, and each has exactly one job.

Everything else, the proof, the services, the map, the reviews, belongs below the fold, where the 43 percent of attention that remains can find it.

What rules do we write folds by?

These are the rules the Firstfold pipeline enforces on every fold it produces, and they apply to any homepage.

• Lead with the practical thing. The customer’s problem, the response time, the thing that is actually different. Not a slogan.
• Use the owner’s words. The one line the owner wrote about what they do is the brief. Rewriting it into marketing language loses the specificity that made it true.
• No adjectives about yourself. Trusted, premier, leading, passionate, dedicated: a visitor cannot verify any of them, so they read as noise.
• The button starts with a verb and says what happens: “Get a quote”, “Book a table”, “See the menu”.
• The headline is under 70 characters so it fits on a phone without wrapping into a paragraph.
• Nothing is invented. No number, year, certification, award or review appears unless the business supplied it or its site already says it. A first fold that claims “500 five-star reviews” the business does not have is worse than no fold.

What does this look like in practice?

The Work page has a real hotel site rebuilt on these rules, measured before and after on Google’s performance test, and three concept builds you can open on a phone. Firstfold builds the first fold of a homepage free, before anything else, precisely because it is the part that decides whether the rest of the site is worth building. What the rest costs is in what a small business website costs, and why it does not have to take three months is in how long a business website takes.

Questions people ask

Is "above the fold" still relevant when everyone scrolls?

Yes. People scroll more than they did: in 2010 they spent 80 percent of their viewing time above the fold and by 2018 it was 57 percent. But the drop in attention after the fold is as sharp as ever, and three quarters of viewing time still lands in the first two screenfuls. Scrolling is normal; reading the bottom of the page is not.

How fast does the first fold need to load?

Google found that 53 percent of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Its Core Web Vitals set 2.5 seconds as the threshold for the largest element on screen to appear, and as of 2024 only 43 percent of mobile sites pass all three vitals. A first fold that appears in under a second is a real advantage, not a nicety.

What should the headline say?

The practical thing that matters to your customer, in the words you would use to a neighbour. "Furnace out? We are at your door in 90 minutes" tells a visitor what happens next. "Your trusted HVAC partner" tells them nothing they can act on. Under 70 characters, sentence case, no adjectives about yourself.

Does the first fold need a big photo or a video?

Not necessarily, and often not. A large hero image or a background video is the most common reason the top of a page is slow to appear, and a slow first fold loses visitors before the picture loads. A strong headline with a clear button and a considered colour and type choice outperforms a stock photo of a handshake.