Website Navigation Best Practices

The ease with which a user navigates your website can be the make-or-break moment for their customer journey. Providing a straightforward path to the goods and services they are seeking is paramount to hooking a customer’s interest and moving them down the sales funnel.

What Makes a Successful Navigation Menu?

How easy is it to navigate your website? Can users find what they are looking for quickly? Users likely to convert typically know what they are looking for by the time they make it to your website. Easy navigation for desktop and mobile formats keeps customers from asking “Where am I?” while on your site. Ensure users can get to their desired destination as quickly as possible to avoid frustration or confusion and bouncing from your website without making a conversion.

Easy site navigation includes:

A User-Friendly Experience for Customers

The quality of your user experience (UX) affects how search engine algorithms rank your site. Navigating menus and layouts should be straightforward and provide users access to the desired content in as few clicks as possible. 

The organization is important. Start with a clear and concise menu on the homepage, then add a limited number of categories for individual pages and posts to fall under. For a larger site consider adding additional subcategories. By filling your navigation menu with content that is short and to the point, customers can find what they are looking for and move forward quickly.

Some, But Not All the Pages in Your Site Map

Creating optimized website navigation is a part of building good website architecture that is easy for search engines to read, but it shouldn’t contain links to every corner of your website. Pages can be part of your site map without being included in the navigation menu. Cluttered, catch-all navigation menus tend to run off the screen, especially on mobile devices. Too many links on the home page can also harm your website’s link authority for SEO.

Concise Navigation Labels That are Easy to Use on All Devices

It is important to have descriptive and specific navigation labels that concisely inform users and search engine crawlers of their relevance and importance. Don’t try to fit in every possible keyword into each label as keyword stuffing dilutes the SEO impact of your menu labels.

What’s Next?

If you’re interested in a coordinated website and digital advertising strategy that showcases your business and converts more leads, we’d love to talk. Reach out for free website analysis to learn more.