How long can a web page be?

Are long web pages a problem? Our analysis of whether there is a problem Some general rules More information How to make long web pages usable

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Are long web pages a problem?

Read the section "Long Scrolling Pages" in Jakob Nielsen's 1996 article Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design.

Before you read the rest of this page, answer the following questions:

• Is there a problem now?
• Do the same rules apply to all parts of a page?

Our analysis of whether there is a problem

Users are now used to scrolling long pages vertically - it's no longer a major problem.

"All critical content and navigation options should be on the top part of the page." (Nielsen's own words).

Some general rules

These are general rules, they sometimes conflict and you have to make trade-offs.

Don't split a page just to avoid vertical scrolling:

• Users are more likely to lose their train of thought if they have to wait for another page to load than if they have to scroll down.
• It's easier to save or print 1 long page than several short ones.

Provide a summary near the top of a long page , so the user can quickly judge whether the full content is of interest to him / her - it could be:

• an abstract - 2 to 4 sentences summarising the content.
• a table of contents which also functions as a menu (we use tables of contents in this tutorial). This also enable the user to read selectively if he / she is mainly interested in a few specific points.

All critical content and navigation options should be in the top part of the page. (Nielsen)

Try to avoid forcing the user to scroll more than 3 times in a page - beyond that point they are likely to lose the thread.
If you have a really gigantic piece of content, break it into pages of a usable size and provide an introductory page with abstracts of and links to the detailed pages - this would be good for an on-line course or manual, an in-depth analysis of a complex topic or non-text material such as a large library of pictures

Make it easy to move round within the page. In particular, at the end of each section add a link to the menu / table of contents. This enables the user to:

• read a section
• jump back to the menu / table of contents
• if he / she wants to continue from the end of the section, use the Back button to return to the end of the section instead of having to scroll and search for it.

Give the user something to look at while the page is still loading.
Avoid full-page tables - the browser will usually display nothing until it has read all the content and calculated the size of each cell of the the table.

Provide an informative title:

• at the top of the page.
• in the title bar of the browser window - this is usually the first thing which is displayed, and is especially important if the rest of the page takes a long time to load.

This is really a special case both of summarising the page and of giving the user something to look at while the page is loading.

More information

The WWW page-length debate summarises most of what's available about page length.

The WWW page-length debate is one of the longest pages on the web.

What does Jorn Barger do to make this long page more usable?

What else could he have done?

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