Left is right

Visitors spend more than twice as long looking at the left side of your web page

When it comes to viewing time, usability expert Jakob Nielsen says, web visitors spend:

• 69% looking at the left half of the screen
• 30% looking at the right half of the screen
• 1% looking at any part of the page that’s visible only by scrolling horizontally to the right

Stick to the conventional layout

To make the most of this reading pattern, Nielsen counsels that you:

• Keep navigation to the left of your page.
• Showcase your top story between one-third and halfway across the page. This is where visitors focus most of their attention.
• Place secondary content to the right.

More reading patterns

Visitors also pay more attention to information that’s on the first screen (“above the fold“) of a web page.

And they read in an F-shaped pattern, focusing on the first line of the page’s main content.

This research studied websites in countries that read left-to-right.

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Source: Jakob Neilsen, “Horizontal Attention Leans Left,” UseIt.com, April 6, 2010