How to fix landmark no duplicate contentinfo on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Go to Storefront → My Themes → click 'Advanced' → 'Edit Theme Files' on your active theme (Stencil).
2. Open templates/layout/base.html. Locate the single <footer> element near the bottom — this is your primary contentinfo landmark.
3. Search the templates/ directory for any additional <footer> tags or role="contentinfo" attributes using the theme editor search or by downloading the theme ZIP and searching locally.
4. Change any secondary <footer> elements to <div role="complementary" aria-label="[descriptive name]"> or simply <div>.
5. For third-party scripts injecting a duplicate footer, go to Storefront → Script Manager, locate the relevant script, and edit it to remove or replace the <footer> or role="contentinfo" in its HTML output.
6. Upload the corrected theme and run axe DevTools to confirm the fix.

What is landmark no duplicate contentinfo?

Every webpage has structural "landmarks" — invisible signposts that screen readers and assistive technology use to navigate the page. The `contentinfo` landmark marks the site-wide footer: the area containing copyright notices, legal links, contact details, and similar site-level information. This landmark is created automatically by an HTML `<footer>` element that is a direct child of `<body>`, or explicitly by adding `role="contentinfo"` to any element. The rule is simple: a page should have exactly one `contentinfo` landmark. If your page contains two or more (for example, a sticky footer widget in addition to your main footer, or a chat widget that injects its own `<footer>`), assistive technology gets confused about which one is the "real" site footer.

Screen reader users — an estimated 7–8 million people in the US alone — rely on landmark navigation to jump directly to page sections without listening to every word. When two `contentinfo` landmarks exist, screen readers either announce both confusingly or skip one entirely, making it harder for visually impaired shoppers to find your return policy, contact information, or legal pages. Beyond accessibility and the real legal risk of ADA/WCAG non-compliance lawsuits (which have steadily increased year-over-year for ecommerce sites), Google's crawler also uses semantic page structure as a quality signal — clean, well-structured HTML is associated with better crawling and indexing. Fixing this issue is also a prerequisite for passing WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.3.6 (Identify Purpose), which is increasingly required by law in the EU, UK, and US.

See the complete Landmark no duplicate contentinfo guide for every platform and the full background.