Help and contact options must appear in the same place on every page
People with cognitive impairments, and anyone who gets stuck during checkout, look for help where they found it before. When the contact link moves around or disappears, they cannot get help and the sale is lost.
- Rule id
- vs-consistent-help
- Source
- Validiscan check
- Impact
- Moderate
- Fix tier
- ASSISTED
- on Shopify, Shopware, WooCommerce and Magento
- Status
- runs
What the check does
Compares pages across the site and flags help mechanisms (contact links, phone numbers, chat, FAQ links) that are present but appear in a different relative order or position from page to page (3.2.6).
The check only compares pages. For each page the scanner records up to 20 visible links whose accessible name or address contains a word such as “help”, “contact”, “Kontakt”, “FAQ” or “chat”. Help without an a element and href, such as a plain-text phone number or a chat button, is not seen; known third-party chat widgets are blocked during scans by default.
A link is identified by its destination, ignoring case, a trailing slash and any # fragment. Once it appears on at least three pages, the check compares:
- its area (header, navigation, main content, footer or elsewhere) with the most common area among those pages;
- its position in document order among the other common help links, pair by pair, with the more frequent order.
Each link is reported once, on the first page that differs; a page without the link is not a finding. Only the first configured viewport, desktop by default, is compared, and visual position is not measured.
How to fix it
Put contact, chat and FAQ links in a shared header or footer section so they appear in the same relative order on every page, including the cart and checkout templates.
WCAG success criteria
- 3.2.6 Consistent Help, level A
EN 301 549 clauses
| WCAG criterion | Version 3.2.1 | Version 4.1.1 |
|---|---|---|
| 3.2.6 | not a clause in this version | 9.3.2.6 |
Start with a free check of your shop.
Send your shop’s address. Validiscan scans it and replies with every failure the scan can prove, with the page and the code.
Request a free checkOr write to info@validiscan.com.
What the free check covers, and what it leaves out- You send
- your shop’s address
- Pages scanned
- up to 15
- You get
- every failure the scan can prove, with the page and the code
- On your shop
- public pages only; no login, nothing bought, no forms sent
- What it is not
- a full audit