Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)

Posted by theandrewbailey 7/2/2025

Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)(www.w3.org)

520 points | 343 commentspage 4

ogou 7/2/2025|

These are good recommendations from a usability and accessibility standpoint. But, marketing managers will bulldoze over all of it. These links are also Calls To Action in the marketing world. They will choose the most clicked version, which is usually the most simplistic and obvious. Many years of A/B/n testing has shown this to be true.

WickyNilliams 7/2/2025||

A compromise is to add visually hidden text to supplement, or use aria-label to override the accessible name of the link

iammrpayments 7/2/2025|||

This. I’d never do this on a landing page it would cause a lot of lost sales.

txdv 7/2/2025||

click here to subscribe

iLoveOncall 7/2/2025||

They don't take their own (bad) advice. They have a "Learn more" link on their homepage: https://www.w3.org/QA/IG/

Anyway, I've learned long ago to ignore UI and UX advice coming from websites that look like theirs.

Animats 7/2/2025||

"If you want to call your reader to action..."

This article is from a marketing perspective. It assumes that the goal of the web site is to get the user to click on the link. Not to offer the user the opportunity to get more detailed info if they want it.

einpoklum 7/2/2025|

You don't have to be marketing anything. When putting links in a website, you are calling the visitor to action - the action of viewing other content or getting a file.

wolpoli 7/2/2025||

Articles in the 90s would suggest webmasters to use "click here" as link text to let users know that a hyperlink is clickable. The advice kind of make sense since hypertext was new back then and users need that little bit of help to navigate.

JadeNB 7/2/2025||

One reason they omit is that, by default, bookmark text is (was? I hardly bookmark any more) the text of the link. So, if you don't curate your bookmarks carefully, you get a folder full of bookmarks called "Click here!"

xnx 7/2/2025|

> bookmark text is (was? I hardly bookmark any more) the text of the link

I'm not sure I've seen this behavior. More commonly, it is the <title> of the page.

Cthulhu_ 7/2/2025|||

Based on the comment I'd expect an "add link to bookmarks" entry in the right click context menu, but I don't remember ever seeing it. It makes sense to use the link text in that case though, else the browser would have to access the underlying webpage to fetch the title. Which shouldn't be a problem, but at one point some web apps were broken and did destructive actions on GET requests, and Google Gears tried to optimize the internet by prefetching webpages... which caused some whoopsies.

But, thankfully, web developers and web technology improved since then.

JadeNB 7/2/2025||

> Based on the comment I'd expect an "add link to bookmarks" entry in the right click context menu, but I don't remember ever seeing it.

I just checked, and desktop Firefox still offers it. At least, version 138 on macOS does.

1718627440 7/3/2025||

There are browser, that lack basic features like bookmarking links?

JadeNB 7/3/2025||

I couldn't figure out how to do it on mobile Firefox, though I couldn't swear it's not possible. I didn't do a survey of others.

JadeNB 7/2/2025|||

I think it depends on how you get the bookmark. As far as I can tell, on mobile Firefox (the mobile browser I have easily to hand), you can only bookmark the page you are currently visiting, where the default bookmark title is the title of the page. But, on desktop Firefox, you can also create a bookmark directly from a link, in which case the default bookmark title is the text of the link. This makes some sense to me, since you probably wouldn't want the act of bookmarking a link to fetch the linked page just to find out its title.

theletterf 7/2/2025||

A similar a11y battle is positional language, for example" "The image below" is positional language that might not mean anything to visually impaired users or folks using different layouts.

ChrisArchitect 7/2/2025||

A related site/discussion last October:

Don't use "click here" for link text

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41925658

sherburt3 7/2/2025||

Always annoys me when people attempt to frame their personal preferences as a codified rule rather than a recommendation. All the examples seem fine with some being marginally better than others.

nlawalker 7/2/2025||

Somewhat related suggestion for other media like emails, docs, and chats:

Ctrl-K is the almost-universal shortcut for “insert hyperlink”, which is strongly preferred by everyone to a 237-character Sharepoint URL.

t1234s 7/2/2025|

If you find you are having to put instructions in your UI like "click here" you may have to rethink it to be more obvious. You don't want make your users have to think.

More comments...