Your page ends and something has to go at the bottom. Search for what, and you get lists of twenty-odd things a footer could contain, which leaves you exactly where you started: holding a menu, not a decision.
The constraint those lists leave out is the useful part. A footer is the one block that repeats on every page of your site, unchanged. Whatever goes in it appears on the pricing page, the about page, and the one blog post you wrote in March. So an item earns its place only if a visitor might want it anywhere, not just where you happened to be thinking of it.
That turns "what could go here" into a much shorter question.
Four jobs, one block
Every item you have ever seen at the bottom of a page is doing one of four things. It says who you are. It says how to reach you. It gives somewhere to go. Or it discloses something you have been asked to disclose.
An item that does none of those is decoration, and decoration in a footer is expensive, because you are paying for it on every page.
The four jobs are also why footers exist at all. Nielsen Norman Group's research on footers describes two reasons people scroll down there: a second chance to be convinced, and a last resort for something they could not find. Both are recovery behaviors. The footer is where a visitor goes when the page above it did not finish the job.
What your footer actually needs
Here is the version that depends on your site rather than on a list of everything. Each row adds to the one above it.
| If your site is | What earns a place |
|---|---|
| One page, and you ask visitors for nothing | Your business name, one line on what you do and where, one way to reach you |
| One page with a form on it | The above, plus a route to your privacy information |
| Several pages | The above, plus the same links as your main menu, in the same words |
| Several pages and a real address | The above, plus the address and opening hours |
Four rows, and most small sites stop at the second or third. That is a much smaller footer than the ones you have been shown, and the reason is worth knowing.
The NN/g article names seven footer patterns, and five of them are for organizations you are not: doormat navigation for very long pages, secondary tasks like job applications and investor information, a site map for a large site, brand portfolio links for a multinational with subsidiaries, and awards for a startup with no recognition yet. Only two of the seven survive at the small-business scale. Utility links, meaning contact details and the policy pages. And customer engagement, which is where social links and signups live, and where most footers go wrong.
So the research everyone quotes is real, and it mostly is not about your site.
All of this assumes the page above the footer is already settled. If it isn't, which blocks that page needs is the earlier decision, and the footer gets easier once it's made.
The links people call legal
This part needs a clear boundary, so here it is: what follows is what commonly appears and where to check, not what you must do. Nobody can tell you what your business is obliged to display without knowing your jurisdiction, your customers, and what you collect.
Three things usually sit in this corner of a footer.
A privacy link, if you collect anything at all. A contact form counts. So does an email signup, and so do most analytics scripts. The shape of the obligation is worth understanding even if the details are not yours to work out: under the GDPR, the European Commission says the information about processing must be given in clear and plain language, at the time the data is obtained. "At the time" is the operative bit. It explains why the link ends up in the one block that is present wherever the form is.
A terms link, if you sell, take bookings, or set conditions people are agreeing to. A site that only describes a service and invites a phone call is a different case from one that takes an order.
A copyright line, which is the most-copied and least-understood item in any footer. In the United States, the Copyright Office states that notice is optional for anything published on or after 1 March 1989, and describes a notice as three elements: the © symbol, the year of first publication, and the name of the owner. Note first publication. The script that bumps the year every January is a habit, not a requirement, and other countries set their own rules.
The four questions to take to whoever handles your compliance are short: what do we collect, why, how long do we keep it, and who else sees it. Bring the answers, not the footer.
What to leave out
The cut list, with the reason each one fails the every-page test.
A newsletter box you cannot send from. Collecting addresses is easy. Mailing them needs a tool, and if you do not have one yet, the box is a promise you are quietly breaking. Birta has no mailing-list feature at all: an email field can be declared as a form and the addresses land in your project, but nothing sends to them.
Social icons to profiles you abandoned. These take a visitor off your site at the exact moment they were considering you, and deliver them to three posts from 2023. If a profile is active and does real work, link it. Otherwise it is an exit.
A site map on a five-page site. The menu already lists five pages.
A repeat of your menu when the menu is always visible. Repeating navigation at the bottom is genuinely useful on a long page where the header has scrolled far away. On a short one it is duplication.
Badges and awards nobody recognizes. A certification your buyers actually ask about is proof. A generic seal is noise.
Your about paragraph, again. The footer says who you are in one line. The about page does the rest.
NN/g's list of recurring footer failures is a good check on all of this: too much hierarchy, unclear link labels, disorganized structure, and footers that are hidden or hard to read. Every one of those is a symptom of a footer carrying more than it should.
One prompt that builds it
There is no footer field to fill in. On Birta the site is files, so the footer is markup your agent writes, which makes a prompt the right tool rather than a workaround. Fill in the brackets and paste it, the same way you would adjust any brief you hand an agent:
Add a footer to every page of this site.
It contains, in this order:
1. The business name, and one line on what we do and where.
2. How to reach us: [email address / link to the contact page / phone],
plus [opening hours / address] if given above.
3. Links to every page in the main menu, using the menu's own wording.
4. [Links to the privacy and terms pages, if those pages exist.]
5. A copyright line: © [year of first publication] [legal name].
Rules:
- One <footer> element per page, as a direct child of <body>. Do not put it
inside <address>, <header>, or another <footer>.
- Identical on every page, so a visitor recognizes it wherever they land.
- Every link's text says where it goes. No "click here" and no "more".
- Do not add a newsletter box, a site map, an award badge, or any social
link I have not given you a URL for.
Before you write it, list what you plan to put in the footer so I can cut it.The last line is the one that earns its place. Left alone, an agent fills a footer the way the internet taught it to, with four columns because four columns look balanced. Asking for the list first turns the whole thing into one decision you can make in ten seconds.
If your contact route is a form rather than an address, the form is its own piece of work, and the footer only needs to point at it.
The pill at the bottom right
One honest note, since this article is about what appears at the bottom of your pages. A site published on a free Birta plan carries a small "Made with Birta" pill, fixed to the bottom right corner of every page. It links to us, it loads nothing from anywhere, and it is what the free plan costs.
It is not part of your footer. It sits above the page as an overlay, so it does not change your markup or your layout, and your own footer still does its four jobs underneath. On a paid plan the pill can be switched off, per site.
Worth knowing for the "who you are" line, too: the address a visitor reads is your Birta subdomain until you connect a domain of your own.
Once the footer is written, it becomes one line in a wider pre-launch pass. The website audit template covers what else to check before the site goes out.
Put the footer on every page at once
The footer lives in the site's files, so one prompt changes it everywhere and one publish ships it.