No, and trying to is one of the most reliable ways to make a page worse. The area above the fold is not a container to fill. It is a decision point where a visitor chooses whether to keep going. Filling it with everything makes that choice harder, not easier.
This argument comes up on almost every project. Someone asks for the pricing, the testimonials, the product shot, and three calls to action all visible without scrolling. The request is understandable. The result is a wall of competing messages that nobody reads.
The research here is unusually clear, and it does not say what either camp claims. The fold has not stopped mattering, and it also does not work the way it did in 2010. Here is where it actually stands.
Above the fold is everything a visitor sees when a page finishes loading, before they scroll. The term comes from newspapers, where the top half of a folded front page was what you saw on the newsstand. On the web it means the first screenful, whatever size that screen happens to be.
The important word is "sees", not "loads". A page can load its whole content instantly and still only show one screenful. The fold is about attention, not about file size or code.
People often argue the term is obsolete because screens vary so much now. Nielsen Norman Group disagrees, and puts it plainly: "The fold still exists and still applies." Every device has a fold. There is just no single fold across all of them.
Yes, far more than they used to, and still not as much as designers hope. Nielsen Norman Group's eyetracking research, drawing on more than 130,000 eye fixations from 120 participants, found that users spent about 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold.
That number is the interesting part. In NN/g's earlier research, 80% of viewing time happened above the fold. So scrolling behaviour genuinely changed. People got used to feeds and long pages, and they now spend a much bigger share of their attention below the first screen.
But attention still drops off fast. The same NN/g research found that 74% of viewing time was spent in the first two screenfuls, up to 2160 pixels. Everything after that shares the remaining quarter. The curve is less steep than it was, and it is still a curve.
So the honest answer is that people scroll when they have a reason to. Scrolling is an extra action, as NN/g puts it, and extra actions need motivation. Nobody scrolls a page that has already told them they are in the wrong place.
It matters enormously, just not as a size limit. Nielsen Norman Group found that content just above the fold was viewed 102% more than content just below it, and describes the average difference in how users treat information above versus below the fold as 84%.
Read that carefully, because it is easy to misuse. It does not mean content below the fold is wasted. It means the boundary itself creates a sharp drop in attention, so what sits right at that boundary is doing a specific job: convincing someone that more is worth their time.
NN/g captures the mechanism in one sentence: "What is visible on the page without requiring any action is what encourages us to scroll." The first screen is not the message. It is the invitation.
That reframing changes what we design. The question stops being "what fits above the fold" and becomes "what earns the scroll". Those two questions produce completely different pages, and only one of them converts.
Everywhere and nowhere, which is exactly why you design for the smallest one first. StatCounter Global Stats put mobile at 52.57% of worldwide traffic in July 2026, with desktop at 45.93% and tablets at 1.5%. Most of your visitors are meeting your page on a small screen.
On a phone, the first screenful is genuinely small once you subtract the browser chrome and any sticky header you added. A headline, a short line of support text, and one button can easily be all of it. That is not a design failure. That is the actual space you have.
The mistake we see most often is designing the hero at desktop width and checking mobile afterwards. By then the headline is four lines tall, the button has slipped below the fold, and the fix is a compromise rather than a decision.
We build the small screen version first for this reason. If the message works in one phone screen, it will work everywhere. The reverse is almost never true. We go deeper on that in our guide to designing a hero section that converts.
Four things, and usually nothing else. Say what you do in plain words. Say who it is for. Give one reason to believe you. Offer one clear next step. If an element is not doing one of those four jobs, it can wait until the second screen.
The single most common failure is a headline that describes an ambition instead of an offer. "Transforming how teams work" tells a visitor nothing. "Webflow sites for B2B companies, built in four weeks" tells them whether to keep reading in about two seconds.
The second most common is too many calls to action. Two competing buttons of equal weight is a question, not an invitation. Pick a primary action, give it real visual weight, and let the secondary one be quieter. That balance is really a hierarchy problem, which we broke down in our piece on what visual hierarchy is and why it matters.
Everything else is negotiable. Social proof, pricing, features, and case studies all work perfectly well on the second screen, as long as the first screen has convinced someone that the second screen exists.
A false floor is a section that looks like the end of the page when it is not. A full height hero with a clean horizontal edge and generous white space underneath reads as a natural stopping point, so visitors stop, and never see the rest of what you built.
Nielsen Norman Group warns about exactly this pattern. When a page appears complete but more content sits below, people simply do not go looking for it. They have no reason to believe there is anything there.
The fix is cheap. Let the next section peek above the fold line. A cut-off heading, the top of a card, or the beginning of an image tells the eye that content continues. Half a visible element does more work than any instruction you could write.
We treat this as a build check rather than a design idea. Before a page goes live, we look at it on a few real viewport heights and ask whether anything looks finished when it is not. It catches problems that never show up in a full length design mockup.
Almost never. If your layout needs an arrow to explain that the page continues, the layout is the problem. Nielsen Norman Group makes the point directly, noting that designs "shouldn't need an arrow to tell users to scroll." An arrow treats the symptom.
Animated scroll cues have a second cost too. They add motion in the exact area where you want someone reading your headline. You are competing with your own message for attention in the two seconds that matter most.
There is one narrow case where we accept them. On a deliberately sparse, full screen visual page where nothing else can hint at continuation, a small static cue can help. Even then we would rather solve it with layout, because layout keeps working when the script fails to load.
Not directly, and indirectly quite a lot. Search engines do not rank you for what sits above the fold. But the hero area usually holds your H1 and your clearest description of what you do, and that text is what both crawlers and answer engines read first to work out what the page is about.
There is a performance link as well. The largest element in your hero is very often your Largest Contentful Paint element, so a heavy hero image or a late loading web font in that area directly damages a Core Web Vitals score that Google measures on real visitors.
The AI search angle is simpler than people expect. Assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews quote clear, direct statements. A hero that says exactly what you do in one plain sentence is far more quotable than a poetic one, which is a rare case where the conversion goal and the citation goal want the same thing.
Open your homepage on your phone and screenshot the first screen. Show it to someone outside your company. If they cannot tell you what you sell and who it is for within five seconds, fix the headline before you touch anything else on the site.
Then look at where the fold lands and ask whether anything below it is visible enough to pull the eye down. Those two checks take fifteen minutes and fix more conversion problems than most redesigns do. If you want the longer version of this thinking, we set it out in our guide to designing a high-converting landing page.
If you would like us to look at your hero and tell you honestly what a first-time visitor is likely to take from it, we are happy to walk through it with you. Come and find us at phoenix.studio.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.