Your website page flow is essential to your online business. It all starts with your navigation menu. You might think placing a link to every page here is the way to go, but its not. And neither is stuffing the pages into drop-down menus to display more pages in less space. Neither of these are quite in line with best practices. Having too many menu items can clutter up a menu and distract visitors from the main purpose of your site.

Your goal should be to use the navigation menu to drive customers to the most vital information about your services and products. If core information about your business is hidden in drop-down menus, masked behind overly clever page titles, or even worse not in your menu, it can make a customer experience difficult.

This is what we call UX (User Experience) in the tech world. Good UX is about helping users quickly and easily get the information they want. In other words, does your navigation menu help people find what they are looking for?

We recently sat down to chat with our very own SEO Google certified experts, Ellington, Tabari, and John to get some insight on best practices for website navigation menus. In this article, you’ll find their tips about what should be there, as well as what information can be in your footer instead.

Choosing the proper font for your website is something that is often overlooked. It is important to select a font for your navigation menu that is easy to read! This is a simple first step towards making sure that your website is easy to navigate. 

John explains, “Your website should be generating leads or closing sales for you depending on what your goals are. Choosing an easy-to-read font for your menu will ensure that you are setting yourself up for success. If people can’t read what you have to offer, you are setting yourself up to fail.”

When planning the pages to highlight in your main navigation menu, focus on what you want visitors to do. Think about the intent of the site. Is it to educate? Is it to sell? Is it to get people to contact you?

If you have a lot of pages on your website, don’t put them all in your main navigation menu. Instead, highlight the core pages with the key information in your main navigation menu. This should include the pages you want people to access at all times. 

Then to help people quickly access other pages, put them in your website’s footer. The footer can act as a sitemap, displaying all the pages you have available on your site. This helps visitors have easy access to more robust pages but doesn’t take away from your business goals, which should be the most accessible pages in your menu. To organize your footer, consider creating categories to display the pages in columns that can help drive users' decisions.

So how many pages should you have in your menu? “Your main menu should have no more than six to eight pages,” Ellington explains. Why only so few? “Because more pages can easily become a distraction from the goal. Where do you want customers to go? If I see more than 10 pages, that goal becomes lost.”

A standard, simple to navigate menu could look like this:

That’s it! The menu’s purpose is pretty clear and can answer most questions for most businesses. These pages, in particular the FAQ page, can serve as a portal to deeper or hidden pages. 

You may also choose to have very specific niche pages on your site to go into more detail about specific products or services, but they don’t have to be in your navigation menu. Once you start going beyond about eight menu options, this is where you get into navigational issues.

When it comes to the main menu, apply world-famous Chef Gordon Ramsay's mantra: keep it simple. It will improve your user’s experience and your own. Too many options in a menu can break down the quality and create unnecessary confusion. This applies to websites too.

Imagine trying to give someone directions on a map, “scroll over to information, then scroll down to fees, then click on policies.” The last thing you want to hear from a customer is, “it was hard to find … I didn’t know where to look …” So the best advice we can give, is to keep your menu simple.

“A site map is a list of links that create a hierarchy for your website”, explains Ellington. The map outlines the flow of your website, highlights important pages, and helps illustrate the flow of your content. In addition to providing the main navigation menu for your primary pages, you can curate your website content into a site map to help visitors quickly access deeper pages. A great place to do this is in your footer.

In addition to creating your own visual site map to guide people through your site, there is also a code-based version built into your website. It's not visible on your website, but accessible to search engines to help them understand the organization of your website. 

Here is an example of how to use your footer to display your site map:

By setting up links in your footer like this you are providing shortcuts to make it simple for people to find specific pages beyond your main menu.

There are a few other things to consider with your website’s navigation that are not just good for your users, but also for SEO.

Be sure to have at least one contact link for visitors to easily get in touch with you

Ellington: Having a contact page, may seem like a no-brainer but not having one is actually a common mistake we see. Without a contact link it is difficult to get customers to interact directly with you, and really important in case they have questions or concerns. If you allow people to book appointments on your website but don't offer a way for people to ask questions, you may unintentionally push away potential customers who want to ask questions before they book. They may want to know more about your product or service, and contacting you is the best way they can get those answers. So make sure there is a clear contact option available on your website.

Link to your Google Business or Maps page

John: Including a link to your Google Business or Maps page is a very fast and easy way to get customers to leave reviews and learn more about your business. 

This also provides an opportunity for people to view your Google Business page without getting distracted by other business listings. It provides a siloed experience, where customers see you on a map and posts about your business and not other Google listings.

Use consistent font types and case sensitivity, never mix them up

Tabari: Another thing you should focus on is having consistent fonts and making them easy to read. Using cursive fonts can be distracting and unreadable. Using a serif or san-serif font is always preferable for menu navigation.

Tabari: You should also make sure you are consistent in how you style text on your website. I’m talking about uppercase and lowercase styling. If your menu text is all caps, then every menu item should be all caps. A mixture of capitalization styles is distracting and can look unprofessional. Choose a style and stick with it.

This also applies to page titles, text on buttons, body copy, and more. Set a style or pattern and stick to it.

Your website navigation is important! As a designer, I always look at my own work and websites I’ve developed and ask myself: Is this easy for me to use? If it is easy, then I ask someone else to test drive the site for me, because it doesn’t mean it is easy for other people. By getting another set of eyes on your website, you may learn a thing or two.

If you need help getting your website optimized for better navigation and site performance, the PhotoBiz SEO team is here to help. Our SEO GO service connects you with our in-house experts who will craft an SEO plan just for you. After your website is optimized, you’ll get monthly analytics reports and additional suggestions to continue working on improving your search results and hopefully gaining more customers.

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