"Put your main content above the fold."

"Put your main content above the fold."

Define "the fold" on 14 screen sizes and get back to me.

There's a real principle buried in this cliché, though. Here's the audit that respects it:

— Open the page on a phone. Is the H1 and the first useful sentence visible before any scroll? If it's three ad units and a cookie banner, fix that.
— Check that the answer isn't gated behind a 600-word intro nobody asked for. Lead with the point.
— Measure how much vertical space is interstitial junk before content. Google's page-experience signals notice intrusive stuff; users notice it faster.
— Don't obsess over a literal pixel line. "The fold" varies by device — optimize for fast access to the answer, which is the thing the fold was ever a proxy for.
— Lazy-load below, never the hero. A hero image that pops in late tanks your Largest Contentful Paint.

The fold is a 2005 newspaper metaphor. (People scroll now. They learned. The data on this settled a decade ago.)