Don’t say ‘click here’ on link text
Posted January 19th, 2009 by David HamillYou should never need to write ‘click here’ on your links. This post explains the reasons why.
Your links should be obvious
In a previous post I advised you to let your hyperlinks shine. This is because your links should be obviously visible on the page. When we’re looking at a web page, we shouldn’t need to guess if text is linked or not We also shouldn’t need to spend a lot of effort seeking out our options.
If links are obvious, we don’t need to be told that we can click them. It’s just patronising.
It’s not a call-to-action
Defenders of ‘click here’ links argue that it’s a call-to-action and these are good. Calls-to-action can be helpful, but ‘click here’ isn’t a good call-to-action. Here are some good examples of calls-to-action:
- Get a quote
- Open an account
- Sign-up now
They are good because they tell us why we should click them. ‘Click here’ is an operational instruction rather than a call-to-action.
It doesn’t tell us where we’re going?
We often read link text on websites without reading any of the text around it. If we’re on a page and we’re just looking for the link we need, we ignore everything that isn’t a link. So ‘Click here’ tells us nothing. If the link we’re looking for says ‘click here’ instead of ‘get a quote’ we might never click it.
It smothers trigger words
So if ‘click here’ on its own is bad, what about ‘click here to get a quote’ or whatever? Well, this is slightly better. At least the text tells us what the link does. We know where we’re going to go if we click it. But finding it on the page could be easier.
The words ‘click here to’ are smothering your trigger words. When we’re scanning a page for links, it takes longer to recognise a link when the helpful words are at the back. If lots of links begin with ‘Click here’ then it can be very difficult to find the link we want.
Good link text is front-loaded, so the most important words are at the front. This makes the link easier to find.
Banner ads
I’ve heard talk that the words ‘click here’ have been statistically proven to increase click-through rates in banner advertisements. I can’t comment on this because it’s not really part of my expertise. It might be true. However nobody has ever been able to show me the research itself. If you know where this research exists, please put a link to it in the comments for this article.
What do you think?
Am I wrong or do you agree with me? Whatever your opinion, please leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Tags: navigation, trigger words, web writing
32 Responses to “Don’t say ‘click here’ on link text”
January 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I totally agree. Although I think another benefit of not using ‘click here’ in links is the SEO benefit.
It’s much better if the anchor text is a relevant keyword.
January 19th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Thanks for the article David!
I agree with your position plenty. In terms of accessibility, people using screen readers generally jump from link to link, so it makes more sense to provide some context *in* the link text itself. Using title attributes also helps in this regard, although phrasing title text always seems to baffle me. What are your thoughts on this?
January 19th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Also David, from an accessibility perspective, ‘Click Here’ or ‘Here’ links can be particularly problematic. Blind users often rely on links list functionality within screen readers in order to navigate through pages. If multiple links to different locations are all labelled identically then blind users are required to spend time navigating in a ‘pot luck’ fashion until they reach the page they require.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Thanks for all your comments guys. Mark you’re quite right. I’d totally forgotten about that reason.
January 20th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I have tasked the webmaster for The Whole Damn Net and its family of websites (removed URL, it was a bit blatant – David) to begin the work of removing “click here” based on the case presented here. Thank you.
January 20th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Excellent post, David. I certainly have been guilty of that in the past.
Setting user expectation is a foundation of usability, and “click here” doesn’t do that at all.
Great website, by the way.
January 20th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Hi Kevin, thanks for the comment. I’m glad you like it.
January 24th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
[...] apparently dislikes the use of ‘click here’. If you want to read what they have to say, click here. They argue that, though not in these words, hyperlinks should be hyper text, not what is [...]
January 28th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Ah yes, I agree.
I actually run some topsites where I put on the button “click here to vote” ..even though clicks to the topsite do not count as votes, they are ranked on traffic. It brings more people to my site though! Is that unethical? heh.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I don’t think it’s unethical Matthew. You are asking users to perform a positive action for your site. If they have a positive opinion of it, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
I’d just change the link to “Vote now” and make it look clickable.
February 5th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
I do agree, however… I spent a long time on a site. I put the hyperlinks in bold AND underlined them as the site was a teaching site for a graphics programme that many older, newbie computer users like.
The links shone.
I received an email that evening from a dear person who asked me where the contact link was.
You can please some of the people some of the time……
February 5th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Excellent article. Good points clearly written. Thanks!
February 5th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
It also isn’t great for SEO.
This piggybacks on the thought that “click here” in and of itself is not descriptive. Not only is it not descriptive to users but also search engine spiders.
February 5th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Hi 1stAngel, How did you receive the email if they couldn’t find the contact page?
February 6th, 2009 at 1:34 am
EXACTLY!
February 9th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Great article. “Click here” links are extremely annoying and unhelpful, particularly in the middle of a large paragraph of text with no immediately corresponding headers or other contextual clues.
Thanks for spelling out the details. UX guidelines are followed much more willingly when they’re coupled with specific reasons for the decisions.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:58 am
I agree to you completely. Its just people need to follow this…
Good article….
February 18th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Good article and I generally agree.
I recently designed a site for people (adults if that makes a difference, not meaning to be agist!) who generally don’t use web sites or computers for that matter so presumably wouldn’t understand that hyperlinks would generally be a different colour or bold or underlined or any of the usual things that links should be. I made the decision to use “click here to…” for this reason only.
I’d be interested to hear what you think of this?
February 18th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Hi Andy. This is a really interesting point, thanks for asking it. I can see why you took that decision, but I’m not sure it was totally necessary . My guess is that the website that you were creating isn’t going to be the first website your target users have ever seen. I would have reserved a vibrant colour for hyperlinks that wasn’t used on any other text and underlined all of my links.
If your target users don’t know what a hyperlink looks like, they will never arrive at your site. They need to click one to get there in the first place.
February 19th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Oddly enough, although I totally adhered to this previously, we’ve been doing some multi-variate testing, and have found that on occasion, adding ‘Click here to ‘ has outperformed ”
February 19th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Hi David, I look forward to learning a little more about that. Perhaps I should start drafting my retraction post just now :0)
February 22nd, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Good point and this was what was going through my mind when taking the decision. The site is a training tool where people are specifically pointed to log on and use for their job so they wouldn’t go through any other hyperlinks to get there.
It is an exception!
March 11th, 2009 at 8:14 am
You write “Good link text is front-loaded, so the most important words are at the front.” I can well imagine that a link of “Show all 25 photos from this collection” is easy to see as it begins with “show” which is something the user wants to do. But this is in English and probably also French. In German for example it would be “Alle 25 Fotos in dieser Sammlung anzeigen”. (anzeigen = engl. show; also it’s infinitive form, not imperative.) Here, the action word comes at the very end. This is common in the German language. Do you think it’s a problem or are German users maybe used to find those trigger words near the end of the link text? Or does it not matter for such short link texts?
March 11th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Fantastic question Yves! Personally my knowledge of German isn’t good enough to have tested with German users. However I’ll try to answer your question. There are 2 things to consider here. What you’re talking about appears to be a call to action. This takes the imperative form in English and French i.e “Find a friend”, “Trouvez un ami”. In German you should use the equivalent for a call to action.
Look in a German cook book. How does it phrase the instructions? In an English cook book it would have numbered instructions, “Mix the sauce together” for example. I would suggest following whatever structure you see there. Your call to action is after all an instruction.
But not all links need to be a call to action. The example you give “Alle 25 Fotos in dieser Sammlung anzeigen” is still frontloaded with important information. “Alle 25 Fotos” makes it clear what the link is for at the very start of the link. So is quicker to scan than if “anzeigen” was at the front. In any case I would opt for a verb that described what the user wanted to do. This would be the German equvalents for “See” of “View”. But that’s a minor point.
March 12th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Hm, I don’t like the German cooking book style… it’s “Man nehme 3 Eier” which translates to something like “You take 3 eggs”, or more explicitly “One takes 3 eggs.” Strange wording they have there… That style is sometimes used for fun in other contexts just to indicate a recipe/steps to do.
As for the imperative form, I’m very much used to and would like to compare it with menu commands in common applications. Take “edit/copy/paste” for example: It’s “Bearbeiten/Kopieren/Einfügen” – all infinitive forms. In English you can’t tell because it’s the same. “Sehen Sie alle 25 Fotos (an)” sounds strange to my ears. Whereas “Registrieren Sie sich jetzt!” (“Register now!”; notice the exclamation mark) fits perfectly into advertisement talk.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Fair enough, it was worth a try.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I had to tweet about this article today.
I notice the problem developing with small businesses who try to do their website on their own (“have blog, will make website” and “no money”). They have seen “click here” for years, so they think that is what they should do. It will take lots of patience to weed out these problems. Now, thanks to you, we can now just point offenders to this article.
March 27th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Click here is a promise that often isn’t backed up. I kinda feel cheated if the promise turns out to be a misleading offer or content.
In contrast “shy links” – I think I coined a sexy term: a gentle click here link that doesn’t appear like a click here link – feel more like a recommendation and not an offer that you might regret.
So maybe from that point of view it is save to say that “cold linking” (mash up consisting of “click here” and “cold call”) deserves the boot.
PS: shy linking/cold linking – I already love these terms.
March 30th, 2009 at 4:28 am
I find it hard to take advice on anchors from someone who doesn’t bother to put alt attributes on them that describe where the link goes…
March 30th, 2009 at 7:57 am
Hi Marc, thanks for the comment. I’m sorry that you find it so difficult to take this advice. After all, it is good advice.
By alt attributes, I take it you actually mean title attributes. Alt attributes are used for elements like images. The text in an alt attribute is used for when the element itself is not available (because it hasn’t loaded or it can’t be seen by the user). The title attribute on the other hand is used on anchor tags to provide a little more information about where the link goes. In a perfect world you would never need to use a title attribute on a link. This is because the link text itself would be descriptive enough.
However I take your point, there are some links on my site that might benefit from a title attribute. I’ll make a point of going through it and adding them where they would be helpful. Thanks for the feedback.
November 6th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Thanks for the advice, I must admit that I immediatly started scanning my own design for any of these usability errors.
July 16th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
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