For the last 20 years “Above the fold” has been pressed into the minds of web developers and designers, for no reason. There is no fold. There, I said it. In the words of Rick Sanchez “gotta rip that band-aid off now, you’ll thank me for it later”. It is not the nineties anymore, so we need to stop designing sites for the nineties.

In the early days of web design and mobile web design, designers and researchers were afraid that users would not know how to scroll down on a site or simply would not scroll down on a site. Years of extensive research have proven this ideology incorrect. The vast, vast majority of users can and will scroll on a website if there is a need for them to.

The term “Above the fold” actually translates from print media, newspapers to be more specific. With newspapers the term still makes sense. Imagine yourself considering buying a newspaper, take a look at the image below.

This is where above the fold comes from. You have to pay to see below the fold. This does not translate to digital. This does not translate to how the average user uses websites these days. Popular sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, they all have infinite scrolling. If users only looked at what was above the fold these sites would shutter. Users know how to scroll, they have been scrolling for years.

The “Above the fold” mentality actually creates more problems than it does solutions. There is not even a consensus of what the fold actually is. With literally hundreds of different devices, different screen sizes, that would mean there are hundreds of different folds. Oh, wait, let’s flip the devices and multiply that by two now. When consulting for my clients, one fall back I find myself using is to look at industry standards. What are the big guys doing? Why are they doing it? Do they know something we don’t?

A look around the web

If we take a look at some of the largest e-commerce website’s mobile versions, we can see how they treat the fold. We are starting with the mobile view, because currently it represents more than half of all Google traffic. Most of these sites we are going to look at consider the other sites we are looking at as major competitors. This gives us a unique insight into what they might think gives them an edge over another site. For this first round of screenshots we are using iPhone 6 in portrait mode.