The fold was a concept borrowed from newspaper design. The most important story above the fold - visible before the reader opens the paper. When the web arrived, the metaphor followed: put everything critical in the top viewport, because that is all visitors will see.
That assumption was already shaky in 2010. By 2024, it has essentially no practical basis.
Why the fold no longer works
The diversity of screen sizes has made "above the fold" meaningless as a fixed specification. A 1080p desktop monitor, a 13-inch laptop, an iPhone 15, and an older Android tablet all have different viewport heights. What sits above the fold on one device is halfway down the page on another.
Designing around a single fold point means making bad tradeoffs for most of your audience.
There is also a behavioral reality that data has consistently supported: users scroll. The gesture is habitual. Anyone who has used a phone in the last decade has internalized scrolling as the basic interaction pattern of the web. The anxiety about content below the fold - that visitors will not discover it - was never well-founded and is even less so now.
What cramming above the fold actually costs you
The instinct to pack everything into the first viewport creates real problems:
Visual clutter. When everything is competing for attention at the top, nothing has attention. Hierarchy breaks down.
Compressed messaging. Strong value propositions take space to land. Truncating them to fit an arbitrary viewport boundary weakens them.
Poor mobile experience. Mobile viewports are smaller, so "above the fold" on desktop means nothing on mobile anyway. Designing for a desktop fold actively hurts mobile layout.
Weaker SEO. Search engines read page structure. A page that compresses all its content into a dense top block rather than organizing it with clear headings and logical flow does not give crawlers the signals they need.
What to focus on instead
The right question is not "what fits above the fold?" It is "how does a visitor move through this page?"
Good page design establishes a clear hierarchy. The headline answers "what is this?" The subheading or intro answers "why should I care?" From there, content unfolds at the right pace - giving visitors reasons to continue, not demanding that they absorb everything immediately.
Logical structure benefits visitors and search engines alike. Sections with clear headings, a narrative that builds, and a call to action that appears when the visitor is ready to act - that is the pattern that converts.
The fold was never a design principle. It was a hardware constraint from a different era. Let it go.