Best Website Footer Examples

What 176 Footer Sections Taught Us About Conversion

What Makes a Good Footer Section?

We scored 176 footer sections across conversion best practices. The table below shows how widely each element is adopted. The lower the number, the bigger your edge by adding it.

Every footer flagged best-in-class has all 5 best practices. The average? Only 29% reinforce trust and 34% have persistent social proof. That's the biggest gap in the data.

Trust reinforcement is the rarest best practice: only 29% of footers use it. When it's there (a SOC2 badge, a partner logo, a certification), it reminds the visitor the company is legit right before they close the tab.

Score Distribution

Across 176 scored footer sections, here's how scores break down. Most land between 60 and 69.

59% of footers score between 60 and 69. 21% break 80. The bar is higher than for heroes — footers are more standardized, so the gap comes down to the details.

How We Score Each Footer Section

Our AI conversion agent evaluates every footer against a weighted checklist that spans two dimensions. Each best practice gets a pass or fail based on the actual page content and screenshot.

• Navigation & compliance, categorized links, legal transparency
• Conversion & trust, secondary conversion, trust reinforcement, social proof persistence

Not every best practice carries the same weight. Secondary conversion and trust reinforcement pull the score up more because in our dataset, footers with those two elements are consistently top-scoring, even when the navigation isn't perfect.

Sections flagged best-in-class are hand-picked by our team from the highest-scoring footers. A high score gets you on the list. Best-in-class means the navigation, compliance, and conversion all work together.

What the Best Footer Sections Have in Common

8 footers in our library are flagged best-in-class. They score higher because they don't treat the footer as an afterthought.

100% of them have all 5 best practices. This is the only section type where best-in-class footers hit 100% on every single criterion. In heroes, the rate varies. In footers, it's all or nothing.

1. Links organized in clear columns. Product, Resources, Company, Legal. The visitor finds what they need in 2 seconds. 89% of footers do this, but the best ones do it with more structure: no mega-lists, no orphan links.
2. A visible secondary conversion. Newsletter signup, social follow, or resource download. The visitor scrolled without converting. This is the last chance to capture their interest.
3. Trust reinforcement. Security badges, certifications, partner logos. 71% of footers skip this. The ones that include it remind the visitor the company is legit right before they leave.
4. Persistent social proof. Award badges, rating stars, "trusted by X teams." One last credibility echo. 66% of footers skip it. The best ones don't.

Greenly, Arrows, Agorapulse, Foleon all do this. Five conversion best practices stacked in a single footer. That's what a perfect score looks like.

100/100

Why Low-Scoring Footer Sections Fail

The lowest-scoring footers in our library aren't poorly designed. They're just empty.

A low-scoring footer typically has 2 best practices: categorized links and legal links. The minimum to look professional. But no secondary conversion, no trust reinforcement, no social proof.

The most common gap: no trust reinforcement. 71% of all footers skip it. The visitor scrolled the entire page, saw your product, your testimonials, your pricing. They reach the footer and there's nothing reinforcing why to trust you. The last screen is a dead end.

Second: no secondary conversion. 48% of footers have no newsletter signup, no social follow link, nothing. The visitor who isn't ready to buy has nowhere to go except close the tab.

The fix isn't redesigning the footer. It's adding 2 elements: a trust badge and an email field. A badge takes 10 minutes. A newsletter field takes an hour. The gap between a generic footer and one that converts is usually two additions, not a redesign.

Want to know which best practices your footer is missing? Try our landing page analysis →

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