You’ve got a beautifully designed logo. Well done. Now, what do you do with it?
Once your high quality logo is designed and ready to go, it should appear on all your branded material, including your WordPress website. Typically, there are three schools of thought as to where logos can go: in the top-left, top-middle, or top-right corners of a page. So this begs the question: which position is right for your logo?
If we’re going strictly based on UX logic, then your logo belongs in the top-left corner of your website. No questions asked. There are two reasons for this:
- For those of us with a native language that reads from left to right, our eyes naturally look to the left first.
- In the earlier years of web design, logos were always on the left, and that’s where most people assume they are located now.
Despite what logic says, there are some websites that have eschewed the norm for logo placements in the center or right corner of a website. Would a unique placement of your logo fit better with your brand identity?
Let’s take a closer look at what the studies show, and see if left really is right for your site.
Experts Weigh In: Where to Place Your Logo?
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, there are three purposes that logos serve on modern websites:
- They remind visitors where they are. In other words, whose website am I on?
- They allow for easy navigation to the home page since most websites no longer include a “Home” button in the navigation.
- They aid in brand recognition as the logo always remains there at the top of the site, and sometimes even follows visitors as they scroll down a page.
The NNGroup performed two studies to find the ideal logo location. Here is what they found:
Left vs. Right
In the left-versus-right study, the NNGroup tested and observed the response of 128 users. Similar to an A/B test, each user was shown only one version of a website: either the original with the logo on the left or the one the NNGroup manipulated in order to place the logo and navigation on the right.
They gave the users a minute’s time to review their version of the website. They were then asked a series of questions and shown photos of 10 hotel websites. This test aimed to establish what sort of effect logo placement had on brand recall.
These were the results:
- Left-aligned logos lead to greater brand recall. Specifically, the average brand recall for left-aligned logos was 39% as opposed to 21% for the right-aligned version.
- Left-aligned logos are more likely to be labeled “unique.” Despite the traditional placement of a left-aligned logo, respondents were still more likely to label a left-aligned logo as “unique” and “stylish” than one that appeared on the right.
Left vs. Center
The Nielsen Norman Group conducted an additional study to discover what happens when
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This article was written by Brenda Barron and originally published on WPMU DEV Blog.