How far people really scroll.
People do scroll. They just spend most of their looking at the top, and each screen further down gets less. Where you put a thing decides how many people ever see it.
2 sources, each one read in October 2026 and linked at the bottom.
THE SHORT ANSWER
The quick version.
People scroll, but attention thins fast. In eye tracking, 57 of every 100 seconds of looking went to the first screen and 74 to the first two. Put the one thing you need seen on the first screen, and give people a reason to believe there is more below.
THE NUMBERS
What the research counted.
57 in 100
seconds of looking went to the first screen, the part you can see without scrolling. Nielsen Norman Group
74 in 100
went to the first two screens together. By the end of the third it was 81. Nielsen Norman Group
80 in 100
was the first screen's share when the same group ran the test in 2010. People scroll more than they used to, but the sharp fall after the first screen has not gone away. Nielsen Norman Group
120 people
took part in the 2018 study, on a desktop-sized screen, with more than 130,000 looks recorded. Nielsen Norman Group
66 in 100
seconds of attention on a normal article page were spent below the first screen, in Chartbeat's 2014 data. The two were measured differently, on different kinds of page. The safe reading is that people will go down a page that keeps giving them a reason to. Time
WHAT TO CHANGE
Why it happens, and the fix for each.
01The first screen looks like the whole page
Nielsen Norman Group calls this a false floor. A tidy first screen with nothing peeking over its bottom edge reads as the end of the page. Nielsen Norman Group
TRY THISLet the next section show at the bottom of the first screen. A cut-off heading or the top of a picture is enough to say there is more.
02The main button is below where people stop
If more than half the looking happens on the first screen, a button that lives on the fourth is seen by a small share of your visitors. Nielsen Norman Group
TRY THISPut your main button on the first screen, and repeat it near the bottom for the people who read everything.
03Long stretches with no signposts
People going down a page skim. Headings and bold text are how they tell where one part ends and whether the next is for them. Nielsen Norman Group
TRY THISGive every section a heading that says what is in it, in plain words. Then read only the headings and check the page still makes sense.
04Nobody has checked where people stop
Page length is not good or bad by itself. The same study's advice is to test with real visitors and find the length at which they still see what they need. Nielsen Norman Group
TRY THISFind the point on each page where most people stop, and make sure nothing you need them to see sits below it.
ON YOUR OWN SITE
Pick how closely to watch.
Scroll depth starts at Vibey. Switch between the three and see what each one writes down.
Coffee, roasted Tuesday.
Shipped Wednesday. Ground to order, never sat in a warehouse.
Card
Hero dwell time, CTA taps, form attempts, and where they ghost the checkout.
Events so far
0
6 of 11 signals
At Vibey and Feral, Moxel records the deepest point each visitor reached on a page, so your pages list can say how far down people get. Mark a part of the page with data-moxel-section and it also records how long that part was on screen. The top of the page is followed as the hero with no markup at all. Feral adds how fast people scroll. Moxel does not draw heatmaps or record the screen, so it tells you how far and how long, not where eyes went.
THE LIMITS
What this cannot tell you.
Eye tracking in a lab is a small group doing set tasks on a desktop monitor. Phones have shorter screens and a thumb makes scrolling cheap, so the split on your phone traffic may differ, and nothing here measured it. Chartbeat's figure is from 2014 and from news sites. Use the studies for the direction and your own pages for the amount.
QUESTIONS
Asked a lot.
- Do people scroll below the fold?
- Yes. In Nielsen Norman Group's 2018 eye tracking, 43 of every 100 seconds of looking happened below the first screen, up from 20 in 2010. Attention still drops sharply after the first screen.
- What does above the fold mean?
- The part of a page you can see without scrolling, also called the first screen. Its size depends on the device, so the fold on a phone sits much higher up the page than on a laptop.
- How long should a page be?
- As long as people keep reading it. There is no ideal length. Check how far down most visitors get, and keep anything you need them to see above that point.
SOURCES
Where the numbers came from.
- Scrolling and attentionNielsen Norman Group, Therese Fessenden, April 2018.
- What you think you know about the web is wrongTime, Tony Haile, then chief executive of Chartbeat, March 2014. Chartbeat measures attention for publishers, so this is mostly news sites.
Read in October 2026. Studies get updated, so follow the link for today's figures.
KEEP READING
More from the field guide.
- Why people leave in ten seconds
- Why people abandon forms
- Why people abandon checkout
- What rage clicks really mean
- Analytics for vibe coded apps
- Your website stats in plain English
- Analytics without a cookie banner
- How to track form abandonment
- Shopify traffic but no sales
- Where people drop off in checkout
- Should the phone field be required?
How Moxel records all of this is in the docs. What it never records is on the privacy page.