Introduction
When designing your website there are lots of factors to consider like the colours, images, text, and menus. Another important decision is where to place your logo.
There are three main options to consider which are; top-left, top-centre and top-right. In this article we’ll discuss each of these in turn and then provide a recommendation for your website.
Before we explore these options, I’d like to clarify what purpose the logo provides on your website:
- Your logo shows your customers where they are so they instantly know whose website they are visiting.
- The logo provides a useful function as a button to quickly navigate back to the home-page.
- It helps improve brand recognition with your customers.
With this in mind, let’s look at the three options for logo position that are available.
Top-Left Logo
Placing the logo in the top left corner of the screen is definitely the most popular option. Amazon, YouTube, Facebook and Toyota are just a few examples of the biggest brands in the world which follow this convention.
The main reason for this is because in the western world we read from left to right and top to bottom. So our eyes are naturally drawn to the top left corner of a page or screen. And as a result, businesses have been putting their logos in the top left hand corner for decades. So therefore it’s what people are familiar with.
In two studies conducted by the Nielson Norman Group, they found some very significant benefits for top-left logo positioning on websites:
1. Better Brand Recognition
When the logo is placed in the top-left corner the survey participants showed a 89% improvement in brand recognition.
2. Easier Website Navigation
Users were 6 times as likely to fail to navigate to the homepage in a single click when the site logo was centered versus left aligned.
Top-Centre Logo
Although a left aligned logo is the most popular choice, there are still websites which choose to put their logos in the centre. However, these are few and far between. In fact, when searching for websites myself I could only find examples from big brands which are newspaper websites like The New York Times, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. The reason why newspapers choose to break from this convention is because having their logo in the centre is how it appears on printed copies which they have been doing for a long time before the internet even existed. There are other examples of smaller brands doing this but they tend to be artistic or minimalistic websites only.
Top-Right Logo
It is widely considered that placing a logo in the top-right hand corner of your website is a big faux pas. The only website I could find with their logo in this position is for The Guardian and this is for the same reason stated above; it’s where their logo is found on printed versions of their newspaper.
Conclusion
When designing a website for your business, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. How can you make it an effortless and enjoyable experience so they spend more time viewing your pages and more likely to come back again in the future?
The position of your logo makes a big difference with brand recognition and ease of navigation. Placing your logo in the top-left hand corner is a convention which has been very well established in website design and is now something that users come to expect. This is why almost all of the biggest brands do the same thing with the exception of a few newspaper organisations.
So if you want to make your website easy to use and your brand more recognisable, we would recommend placing your logo in the top-left corner of your website.
If you’d like us to help create or redesign the website for your business, please get in touch and we’d love to work with you.
