The curse of ‘click here’
2 minutes read
You know it’s funny. I’m yet to see any posters inviting people to ‘read here’, buttons asking people to ‘press this’ or bottles imploring people to ‘drink this’ (Alice in Wonderland aside) , and yet I still see websites requesting their users to ‘click here’ to follow some link. The use of ‘click here’ is one of those bad design habits, like frames, flashing text and animated logos that I thought had died out by now. Sadly it seems that the practice is still very much alive and well. Even our esteemed friends at Mozilla are doing it and they are supposed to know and thing or two about the web!

So what’s wrong with using ‘click here’?
What’s worng with using ‘click here’? Well quite a few things actually.
- It’s bad for usability. Using ‘click here’ for a link forces users to read around the link to find out what they should actually be clicking for. It’s a bit like labelling the up and down arrows for a lift to ‘press this to go up’ and ‘press this to go down’!
- It’s bad for readability. ‘Click here’ invariably leads to clunky and overly long winded text. Why use ‘Click here to download the file’ when ‘Download file’ will suffice?
- It’s bad for search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engines like Google will use the text for links going to a page to help determine what that page is about. Using ‘click here’ is about as useful to Google as a chocolate teapot (which thinking about it could be surprisingly useful, just so long as you like cold, chocolaty tea).
- It’s bad for accessibility. Don’t forget that some users might not even be using a mouse so can’t ‘click here’ even if they wanted to. Also screen reader users will often deal with links out of context, such as bringing up a list of all the links on the page. A list of ‘click here’ link is obviously going to make their lives somewhat difficult.
A list of ‘click here’ links would make no sense within a screen reader - It’s patronising. Users know how to follow a link. They don’t need being told that they should ‘click here’ to do something, like it’s their first time using a computer!
So what should I use instead?
Well in the words of the World Wide Web consortium:
“Good link text should not be overly general; don’t use “click here.” Not only is this phrase device-dependent (it implies a pointing device) it says nothing about what is to be found if the link if followed. Instead of “click here”, link text should indicate the nature of the link target, as in “more information about sea lions” or “text-only version of this page”.
HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
In other words good link text should:
- Be descriptive. Ideally it should make sense out of context, such as ‘Retry the file download’ in the above Firefox example rather than ‘click here’.
- Be as short as possible. Take a leaf out of Einstein’s book. Make link text as simple as possible but no simpler.
- Be goal orientation. Ideally a link should also be a call to action for users, such as ‘Download file’, ‘Read more’ or ‘Log out’.
- Be written in plain English. Avoid confusing acronyms, jargon and techno babble.
- Be in sentence case. Avoid shouty upper case links. Upper case text (i.e. ‘DOWNLOAD FILE’) is generally harder to read than sentence case (i.e. ‘Download file’) and isn’t anywhere nearly as polite.
- Let users know what is being linked to. Let users know if the link is to something other than a web page, such as a PDF or Word document. For example, A really rather important document (PDF).
- Warn users if the link will open in a new window. Give users a heads up if the link will be opening in a new window as outlined in Beware of Opening Links in a New Window (written by yours truly). For example, An awesome article (opens in new window).
- Not be ‘Click here’. Hope you’ve been paying attention!
4th December 2010 @ 4:35 pm
I totally agree with you. But, the sad thing is, it’s not true.
Not everybody knows how to follow a link. And it’s been shown that when using calls to action like “click here” people do actually follow the link much more.
I guess the reason for this mess is that the “click here” thing has been abused too much for too long, so now many people do expect it to say “click here”. Also, given that links don’t always look like links (your links are not underlined) you don’t always really know whether you can actually click it, what will happen if you do, etc.
I still follow and recommend these same principles, though.
18th January 2011 @ 7:15 pm
Agreed… My main gripe with it is what you point out first. The phrase causes the user to do so much more work than just reading a link and clicking. Who wants to read around a word to find out what a link is about? Not me.
24th January 2011 @ 2:32 pm
All though I agree with the idea, another option (for tight spaces) is to add a title tag to the link, so that on hover, you can get the full link text. Which is also good for SEO.
15th March 2012 @ 1:27 am
Strangely enough, been having this conversation on twitter today.
I agree with your article but the odd thing I’ve found is that click here is one of the top buttons (from about 160 odd combinations of copy) we’ve tested in every country, in every test. It’s always in the top 3, and usually along with ‘Fix My Glass’ and ‘Get Started’ as part of a two part strapline and big call to action.
Using click here is abhorrent to me in copy text and hyperlinks or where there is no context, no framing. But when you use it like ‘Start your download. [click here]’ where the ‘click here’ is a call to action button, it works very well.
Nectar tested this in some detail, Lovehoney have done tests and at Belron, we’ve now got data on over 28 million tests showing that click here does indeed work in specific contexts.
16th March 2012 @ 8:59 am
Probably the general reason for keeping “click here” is that people are used to…
It is funny if you google “click here”. The first result have nothing to do with clicking here…