navigation - Why is it standard for a website logo to navigate to the home page?

Why has it become an industry standard for logos to redirect a user to a website's homepage?

Where was this first seen?

Answer

Where was this first seen

This practice dates back at least to the earliest days of image hyperlinks. For example, the Internet Archive's earliest snapshot of Yahoo's home page from October 1996 has a clickable Yahoo! logo.

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Why has it become an industry standard?

1. Convention

• Conventions are self-perpetuating. Given the ubiquity of this practice, users often expect something to happen when they click on a logo, so it's now awkward if nothing happens. There is, obviously, a chicken-and-egg circularity to this argument but that is why many conventions persist and also why they perpetuate.

2. Semantics

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  Originally, hyperlinks were used primarily to denote semantic content elements which a user could follow to a related page. The logo for a company is similar to the name of the company or a person: it has semantic meaning. So for the same reason it would make sense to hyperlink a key person's name or a company's name, it would make sense to hyperlink a logo.

  
  


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  Why hyperlink to the home page rather than a page about the company? Because the user is already on the Company's site so there is a need to figure out what the likely intent of a user is. Since the user could be visiting any page on the site with any context, the most reasonable destination for clicking the semantic logo element is the company's home page: by design, a default starting point for any visitor to the company.

  
  

3. Design

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  Going "back to home" is a very common interaction for users browsing a corporate website. At the same time, an extra home button may be undesirable or awkward to place on a site for various reasons. Since it's usually desirable to keep the company logo on most pages on a website, it's a common design choice to use #1 and #2 above to use the logo as the home button for the site.

  
  
  
  
  • As JonW noted in a related question a while back, about 63% of top sites do not offer an explicit home page button, relying instead on the logo/company title.