Users scroll. They just won’t scroll through boring
Here is the truth no one wants to admit. People scroll. People have always scrolled. People will scroll through anything if the story is worth following. It is why you have watched someone’s entire Bali holiday on Instagram even though you do not care about their life. It is why you have fallen into a Reddit thread about a bloke who found a snake in his BBQ. Humans scroll because humans are nosey and curious. Boredom is the only real stop sign.
Somewhere along the way the web industry convinced itself that the fold was sacred ground. Keep it above the fold. Everything above the fold. Put your whole pitch in the top 600 pixels or the user will vanish into the void. Yet that advice came from newspapers in the 1920s. Not the internet in 2025. Not the device in your hand that is literally built for scrolling. The only thing users refuse to scroll through is laziness. Waffle. Copy written like an accountant. Layouts that look like they were generated by a committee that feared colour and joy.
If the first thing a visitor sees feels alive, they move. If it feels like melted cardboard, they bail. Motion, character, clarity, tension. These things tell the brain to stay alert. Good websites build rhythm. They pull you down the page like gravity. They answer questions at the exact moment the user thinks them. They use whitespace like a breath, not like empty space the designer forgot to fill. They make scrolling feel less like a chore and more like a reveal.
The real secret is simple. Scrolling is a behaviour. Engagement is an emotion. You do not earn that emotion with a hero image and a tagline that could be copied onto any other site on the internet. You earn it by giving people a reason to care. A story worth following. A voice that feels alive. A structure that feels intentional. By the time they reach the footer they should feel like they got somewhere, not like they survived something.
Stop blaming the fold. Stop designing like you are scared people will leave. They will leave when you are boring. Make the story good and they will scroll till their thumb hurts.