Scrolling through a Page Quickly with Keyboard Shortcuts

When viewing pages on the Web, there are a number of ways to get around. Interacting with the browser's scroll bar is one of the more tedious options, in my opinion. Let's speed up the process with keyboard shortcuts.

The problem with scroll bars is that interactions need to be precise. Clicking one pixel above the down button, for example, makes the page jump further than expected. There's also been a trend of websites stylizing the scroll bar (Are Skinny Scroll Bars Worth the Hit to Website Usability?) which can make them difficult to use. At least there is another way.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The standard scroll bar provides different options for moving the page and each has a keyboard alternative. Note that we'll focus on the vertical scroll bar.

• Down Arrow / Up Arrow – The down and up arrows on the keyboard can be used for scrolling the page down and up in small increments. This is the same as clicking the scroll bar's down and up buttons.
• Page Down / Page Up – Larger page jumps can be made by clicking the space between the scroll bar's slider and the down (or up) button. This same operation can be accomplished with the keyboard's Page Down and Page Up keys.
• End – Pressing the End key allows us to quickly jump to the bottom of a page. This is handy for accessing contact information which many websites place in the page footer…or getting to the comments form at the bottom of most blogs.
• Home – The Home key sends us back to the top of the page. With this shortcut, who needs those silly "Go to Top" links.

Conclusion

Keyboard shortcuts are excellent for getting things done faster. Remembering which key to use may take time, but it's worth it in the end. There are even shortcuts for doing things the typical scroll bar doesn't allow, such as jumping to the page bottom. So why not give a few of these shortcuts a try.