Best Practices for Your Website Navigation Bar

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Website Navigation Bar

If you’ve ever hurried to click the back button after seeing a cluttered and unreadable website, you’ve already seen “The Blink Test” at work. This term refers to the first 3-5 seconds in which a visitor looks at a website and decides whether they want to stay. Marketers sometimes use it to gauge the effectiveness of their website design.

While there are multiple components that can help you pass this informal test, one crucial thing to consider is your website navigation bar. If your menu is cluttered, confusing, or just plain unattractive, most readers will click away rather than stick around to decipher it.

Not sure how to put your best foot forward? Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when considering what to put on website navigation.

Limit Your Options

If you have an expansive website that boasts dozens or even hundreds of pages, it may feel tempting to add most of them to your website navigation bar. However, limiting the number of menu items can be a good idea for a few reasons.

First, it’s easy for us as humans to grow overwhelmed when faced with too many options. According to one classic psychology paper, our short-term memory only allows us to hold seven concepts at once. Streamlining your menu with seven items or fewer can help readers navigate with ease.

Second, having fewer links on your homepage can give your internal pages more authority with search engines. Your website’s authority gets divided and diluted among all of the links on your homepage. This can make it harder for your internal pages to rank if you’re linking from your homepage to every single internal page on your site.

Last, fewer options can help streamline the visual appearance of your homepage, offering a cleaner design that’s more in line with modern website design and UI trends.

Be Descriptive and Concise

Descriptive language in your navigation bar is great for SEO because it captures the relevance and value you’re bringing to readers. It’s also great for readers themselves, as it helps them understand your solutions at a glance.

However, balancing the right descriptions with concise language can be harder than it sounds!

Make sure you’re using terms that explain your exact offerings, such as “Coaching” instead of “Services” or “Subscription Boxes” instead of “Our Products.”

You may have to do some wordsmithing to make sure that each entry is both relevant and short. Using briefer terms can free up space on your menu bar while making sure readers and search engines quickly understand what you offer.

Consider Your Positioning

Once you’ve landed on the concise terms you want to use, don’t forget that position matters! We’re primed to think that the items at the top (for a vertical menu) or on the left (for a horizontal menu) are the most important, so use this effect to your advantage. Any popular items, or items that are the core of what your business does, should be in the most important positions.

Be Thoughtful With Dropdown Menus

Once you’ve narrowed down your main selection, where do you put all of those extra links to internal pages and subcategories? For many businesses, the best bet is a dropdown menu.

However, dropdown menus can often be frustrating for site visitors, who may have to maneuver from option to option before finding what they need. That’s where a helpful new trend comes in: the mega menu.

These advanced menus showcase a wide variety of topics and categories at a glance without forcing visitors to jump between multiple dropdowns. One great website navigation example is Home Depot’s homepage, which offers a mega menu when visitors hover over the items in their main menu.

If you are not using a mega menu, be sure to avoid using more than two menu levels (i.e. the main navigation and a single dropdown), as this can make it more difficult for readers to navigate.

Optimize for Multiple Users and Devices

Your navigation shouldn’t just be obvious to tech-savvy computer users. You should also make sure you’re optimizing for users who are elderly, for example, or those with visual disabilities. It’s also important to optimize for users on a range of modern devices.

If you’re not sure how to ensure this, working with experts like the team at hiltonwebdesign.com can help.

Add a Call-to-Action

You should always include your site’s primary call-to-action (CTA) on your navigation bar. Great design includes a prominent button in a different shade from the other menu items.

Like the rest of your navigation language, make sure your CTA is concise but descriptive, allowing readers to guess where they’ll go if they click.

Link to the Homepage

One more simple best practice involves using your company’s logo to link back to the homepage. This allows visitors to “reset” their site experience by traveling back to the homepage with a single click. The majority of websites position this logo in the top left corner, but it can also be placed on the right or in the center of the navigation bar.

Declutter Your Website Navigation Bar

In today’s fast-paced digital world, it’s important to grab and retain attention fast—which is hard to do with a cluttered or confusing website navigation bar. Fortunately, the best practices above are simple ways to streamline your design. Make sure to consider each menu item with care, and don’t hesitate to reach out to web design experts for more specific guidance!

Want more helpful tech tips? Our other posts are packed with tech and marketing insights, so be sure to check them out.