Why the Footer Repeats at the Bottom of Every Frame

A bar pinned to the bottom of the window — a cookie notice, a newsletter prompt, an add-to-basket toolbar, a video player that shrank into the corner — appears once per screen down your stitched capture.

It is the same mechanism as a repeating header, and it is worth its own page because it is harder to spot and it does more damage.

What is actually happening

A full-page screenshot is not a single exposure. The page is taller than the window, so the capture scrolls down a screen, photographs, scrolls again, photographs again, and joins the pictures into one tall image.

Anything pinned to the window stays pinned while that happens. A footer bar is at the bottom of screen one, the bottom of screen two, the bottom of screen three, and it lands in the final image once for every screen the page took.

Why it is worse than a repeating header

It is easier to miss. A bar at the foot of a section reads as page furniture — a divider, the end of a block. You scan past it. A menu appearing six times is obviously wrong; a grey strip appearing six times often is not, until someone else points it out.

It hides content rather than sitting above it. A header covers the top of a screen, which is usually the start of a section and often just white space. A footer covers the bottom, which is usually mid-paragraph. Every repeat takes a bite out of the text underneath it, and those bites are gone from the image.

The offenders are large. Consent bars and promotional toolbars are frequently a fifth of the window in height. Six of those in one image is a considerable amount of the page you did not capture.

How to recognize it

The repeats are evenly spaced, and the gap between them is the height of your browser window. If you can see text disappearing behind each one and resuming below it, that is the confirmation.

An element that appears partway down and then continues, rather than from the first screen, is a different problem — usually something that loaded late, which is covered in why a chat widget floats in the middle of your screenshot.

What you can do about it

1. Dismiss it first. Most footer bars have a close button, and a cookie bar goes away once you answer it. This is the only fix that also recovers the content the bar was covering.
2. Delete the element before capturing. Right-click the bar, choose Inspect, delete the highlighted element. It stays gone until you reload.
3. Use the print view. Ctrl or Cmd and P, then Save as PDF. Print stylesheets almost always drop pinned bars, because nobody wants a cookie notice on paper.
4. Make the window taller. Fewer screens means fewer repeats. It reduces the problem rather than removing it.

What PageStill does

It hides elements that stay put while you scroll after the first screen has been captured, then restores them when the capture finishes. That covers footers and headers alike — anything pinned to the window is in the image once, where it belongs, and not repeated down it.

The content the bar was sitting on top of is still hidden in the first frame, so dismissing a bar you can dismiss is still worth doing before you start.