Most home pages still have no way to skip the navigation
A keyboard-only visitor has to tab past your entire menu before reaching the page you built. Most sites still make them do it, and the fix takes minutes.
A visitor using only a keyboard lands on your home page and presses Tab. The first stop is the first link in the header, then the second, then every other item in the main menu before a single word of the page they actually came for gets focus. On a site with a deep navigation bar, that can be ten or more presses spent on a menu the visitor has already seen, repeated on every single page they open.
A skip link removes that step. It is one hidden link, revealed the moment it receives focus, that jumps a keyboard user straight past the header to the main content. Most sites still do not have one.
Skipping repeated navigation is a baseline requirement, not an advanced one
The relevant rule is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Success Criterion 2.4.1, Bypass Blocks: "a mechanism is available to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on multiple web pages." The W3C's own guidance on it explains the intent plainly: to let people who move through a page sequentially, chiefly keyboard users and screen reader users, reach the primary content without walking the same repeated header and navigation on every page.
Bypass Blocks sits at Level A, the entry tier of WCAG conformance, the checks every higher level assumes are already satisfied. A site investing in AA-level color contrast or focus indicators while failing this one is polishing details on top of a foundation that has not been poured.
Roughly five in six home pages still fail it
WebAIM tests the home pages of the top one million sites on the web each year. Its 2026 edition, published in February, found a skip link present on 17.1% of them, up from 15.3% the year before. Read the other way: about five in six home pages still send a keyboard user straight into the header with no way around it.
Testing your own page takes about ten seconds and no tools: load it, press Tab once, and read what receives focus. A visible "Skip to content" (or similarly labeled) link is a pass. A jump straight to the first item in your main menu is not.
The ones that exist are often broken
WebAIM's same report found roughly one skip link in ten does not work: it is hidden in a way that also hides it from keyboard focus, or it points at a target that is no longer on the page. Both failures are common and both are usually accidental.
The first happens when a skip link is styled with display:none instead of moved off-screen and revealed on focus. A link nobody can see and nobody can tab to is not skipped past, it is simply absent, and it will pass a casual glance at the markup while failing every actual test. The second happens during a redesign: a heading gets renamed, an id="main" moves onto a different wrapper, or a template swap drops the anchor the old link pointed to. The link still renders. It goes nowhere.
Our own sweep lines up with the industry number
Go Voltic's scans check for a working skip-to-content link on every page audited. Over the trailing 30 days, 5,767 scans were considered and 4,612 of them, across 4,581 distinct sites, returned no working skip link: about 80%, close to WebAIM's roughly 83% across a much larger sample of home pages measured a different way. Two independent measurements landing in the same range is a stronger signal than either alone.
The cost lands hardest on repeat visits
A skip link's absence does not cost a keyboard user once. It costs them once per page. Someone comparing three product pages on the same site retypes the same walk through the header three separate times before reading anything new. On a site with a long mega-menu or a cookie banner ahead of it, that walk can run past twenty stops.
None of this makes a site legally compliant with anything once fixed, and no scan or checklist certifies compliance with WCAG or any other standard; that determination belongs to a site's own counsel, working from the full set of criteria. What a scan can say is narrower and still useful: whether this one specific barrier is present, and for whom.
The fix, and how to keep it working
- Add a link as the first focusable element inside
<body>:<a href="#main" class="skip-link">Skip to content</a>. - Give the main content region a matching id, typically on a
<main id="main">landmark, so the link has somewhere to land. - Hide the link visually until it receives focus, moving it off-screen with position and revealing it on
:focusrather than usingdisplay:none, which would hide it from keyboard focus too. - After any redesign or template change, confirm the target id still exists. A renamed heading or a moved landmark is the most common way a working skip link quietly stops working.
- Test it the way a keyboard user will: load the page cold, press Tab once, and read what has focus.
Go Voltic's scans read this off pages already fetched for other checks, so verifying it costs nothing beyond the scan you would run anyway. The five steps above cost less than the ten seconds it takes to test whether they are already in place.
Sources
- Understanding Success Criterion 2.4.1, Bypass Blocks. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, read 2026-08-16
- The WebAIM Million 2026, an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages. WebAIM, read 2026-08-16
Run a free Instant Scan on your own site · More from the Newsroom