Above the fold / Below the fold

The phrase comes from newspapers. A broadsheet was displayed folded in half on the stand, so only the top half of the front page sold it. Web design borrowed the term in the 1990s, when most screens were 640 by 480 pixels and the fold sat at a fairly predictable place.

It no longer does. Screen sizes now range from a phone in portrait to an ultrawide monitor, so there is no single fold, only a distribution of them. Treating one pixel height as the fold is how a design ends up optimised for a screen almost nobody has.

What the research actually supports

The useful finding is not that people refuse to scroll, because they do scroll and always have. It is that attention is heavily weighted toward the top of the page. Nielsen Norman Group’s eye-tracking work has repeatedly found viewing time concentrated in the upper part of the page and dropping sharply below it.

So the practical rule is about ordering, not about cramming. What appears first should tell the reader where they are and whether the page holds what they came for.

In practice

Two failure modes are common. The first is stuffing everything above an assumed fold, which produces a cramped hero that answers nothing. The second is a full-viewport image with a one-word headline, which pushes every piece of substance out of sight and gives the reader no reason to continue.

A page passes the test when the first screen answers “what is this and is it for me”, and the content immediately below it visibly continues rather than looking like the end.