Call Buttons That Follow You Down the Page

The number scrolls away

On a phone, the number in the header disappears as soon as a visitor starts scrolling. By the time they have read the service page and decided to call, it is three screens up.

Some scroll back. Others return to the search results, where a competitor's number is sitting in plain view.

A sticky call button solves that: a small bar or button that stays at the bottom of the screen as the page moves, so calling is always one tap away.

Done well, it is one of the most useful things on a service business's phone site. Done badly, it covers the page and annoys the people it was meant to help.

Who it helps

It suits businesses where the phone is how work arrives: trades, repairs, clinics that book by phone, anything people need soon.

It suits pages that people read before calling, such as service pages, price guides and project write-ups, where the decision happens partway down.

And it suits phones only. On a desktop, few people can call by clicking, and a button that opens a calling program they never use is a nuisance. There the number belongs in the header as text.

How it gets in the way

• Too tall, taking a large slice of a small screen.
• Covering form fields and the send button.
• Stacked with other bars, cookie notices and chat bubbles.
• Shown at midnight, when every call goes to voicemail.
• On every page, including articles read for other reasons.
• Hiding the last line of text on every screen.

The second is the most costly, because it fails visitors who have already decided to get in touch. On some phones, a fixed bar sits right on top of the field being typed in once the keyboard opens.

Small enough to ignore

The button should be big enough for a thumb and no bigger. A slim bar across the bottom, or a round button in one corner, is plenty.

Use words as well as the phone symbol, such as Call now or Call for a quote. A symbol alone can be mistaken for a menu or a chat.

Google's rule against pop-ups that cover content on phones, in force since January, is aimed at large interstitials. A slim bar that leaves nearly all of the screen to the page is the kind of banner it permits.

Keeping it out of the way

Hide it on the contact page, where the number is already the biggest thing on screen, and on every page with a form, so it never sits over a field or the send button.

Leave room for it. Add space at the bottom of each page equal to the bar's height, so the last line of text and the footer links never end up beneath it.

If the site has a chat bubble or a back-to-top arrow, move them so nothing overlaps. Two things in one corner is how visitors end up tapping the wrong one.

Only when someone can answer

A call button at eleven at night invites exactly the call nobody is there to take.

Whoever maintains the site can make the button follow your opening hours: Call now during the day, and Request a callback or Send a message outside them, leading to a short form.

Base the hours on your own time zone, not the visitor's phone. Someone in Ontario browsing at nine in the morning is reaching you at six.

Statutory holidays need the same care, or the button will invite calls to a closed office on Boxing Day.

A worked example

A handyman service run by two partners with one van takes most of its work by phone: small repairs, fixtures, the jobs too small for a contractor.

Its service pages were long and useful, listing jobs room by room with rough prices. On a phone, though, the number vanished as soon as anyone scrolled.

A call bar was added as a bright orange strip across the bottom of the screen. It sat over the send button on the quote form and appeared on every blog article.

It also invited calls at midnight, to a voicemail box that was already full.

The bar is now a slim strip reading Call for a quote. It does not show on the contact page, the quote form or the blog, and every page has space at the bottom so nothing hides beneath it.

From six in the evening to seven in the morning, and on Sundays, it reads Request a callback and opens a three-field form.

Which pages carry it

The button belongs on the pages where people decide to call: services, prices, areas served, the home page.

It does less good on articles and guides, where most readers are researching and many live far outside the service area. There it mostly gets in the way of reading.

Counting the taps

Analytics can log every tap as an event, together with the page it happened on. That shows which pages produce calls and whether the button is used at all.

A tap is not a finished call, since some people tap and hang up. But a page with many taps and a page with none still tell you where the button earns its space.

If almost nobody taps it after a few months, it is clutter, and the honest answer is to remove it.

The counter-case

Not every business should have one. A business that needs written enquiries with photographs or measurements is better served by a clear form than by a button inviting calls it cannot quote from.

A one-person business up a ladder all day may prefer messages to calls it cannot answer, and a button that opens a text or a form suits it better.

And a site whose pages are short, with the header number never far away, gains little. Where calls are how the work arrives, though, a small button that knows the hours is worth having.

Setting it up

1. Show it on phones only.
2. Keep it slim, with words beside the symbol.
3. Hide it on forms and the contact page.
4. Add space at the bottom of each page.
5. Switch to a callback form outside opening hours.
6. Leave it off articles and guides.
7. Count the taps as an analytics event.

Step five is the one most call buttons lack. A button that invites calls nobody can answer turns a keen visitor into a voicemail; a callback form at night keeps the request until morning.

The hours themselves, shown where people look for the number, are covered in opening hours next to the phone number.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.