---
title: "Collapsible header sections – more problematic than helpful"
date: 2013-12-11
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2013/12/11/collapsible-header-sections-more-problematic-than-helpful/
---
# Collapsible header sections – more problematic than helpful
A while ago I converted nearly all of my help's subheadings into collapsible sections. I trend toward longer help pages, and the collapsible heading sections seemed like a natural way to provide a kind of clickable TOC. Readers could see up-front all the sections on the page and go directly to the section they needed. No need to scroll and scroll. Collapsible sections, it seemed, provided a way to reduce long pages into a more usable form.

And so I went about collapsing my heading sections. That's when I started noticing how problematic collapsible sections get.

## Problem #1: Pages get too long

If you can collapse your heading sections, your pages can get really long because you can just keep adding more and more sections without feeling like the page is too massive.

This may seem cool at first, since it means you can reduce the overall number of pages in your help material considerably. You can potentially reduce the unique page count to a third of the normal size, without forcing readers to look at infinitely scrollable pages.

However, long pages are often harder to manage. There comes a point when there's simply too much information on one page. The human mind does a better job processing information when the information is divided into smaller chunks (to an extent -- the chunks can't be too small or you lose context).

For me, a good page size is anywhere between about 500 and 1,500 words or so. But when you start hitting the 2,000 + word count range, it doesn't seem to work as a regular web page.

If you make your pages shorter, the need for collapsing sections decreases. Some topics may be only 300 to 600 words long. For those pages, do you still collapse the section headings? It looks silly if you do, and inconsistent if you don't.

This pretty much sums up the problem. Shorter pages don't need collapsible sections. The majority of tech writers create help in short topics rather than long topics (often because they're single sourcing), so that's why you rarely see collapsible sections used in help material -- short pages just don't need them.

## Problem #2: Where to start collapsing

Another problem with collapsible headings is figuring out where to start collapsing them. If you have an introductory paragraph on your page, following by maybe 5 or 6 subheadings, most likely you'd just start collapsing each subheading.

But if that introductory paragraph is rather short, maybe 1-2 sentences, the page looks mostly blank. You have all of this empty space due to the collapsed headings.