The Five Deadly Sins of Website Navigation You Should NOT Commit

Believe it or not, a website navigation is an important factor that can either make or break your website. It greatly affects your website traffic, conversion rate, user experience and most of all, search engine rankings. Everything that matters most to your website, from web design to content to URLs, is directly associated with the navigation menu. Here I’ve discussed some common website navigation mistakes that you should not commit.

Your website visitors expect to see a standard, typical navigation style. Following a standard style for your website navigation can make your website easier to use. This will ultimately decrease your bounce rate, increase your pageviews and high conversions.

The main purpose of the website navigation is to guide users to find their desired content, product or information, and if your navigation menu is not following the standard style, then they will more likely abandon your website.

Your navigation bar must be self-explanatory and descriptive enough. Using generic labels like services or products are something that almost every business website uses but they can’t clearly communicate with your visitors. Similarly, the what we do button doesn’t say everything about what you do. Therefore, it is highly recommended to make your website navigation descriptive to decrease your bounce rate.

Trust me, adding hundreds of links to your navigation is the worst thing that you can do to your website. With fewer menu options, your visitors can easily memorize the important items. Therefore, it is always advised to limit your menu options to four to six items.

A menu bar with fewer options is also important for SEO point of view. When your homepage navigation links to other landing pages, it passes some of its credibility to that pages, increasing the chances that the landing pages will rank. SEO call this credibility, link juice or authority.

Do you know using drop down menus can make crawling and indexing difficult?

A usability study by NN Group suggests that drop down menus are annoying. Because it makes visitors to move their eyes faster than the mouse. And when a visitor decided to click on the menu item, the drop down gives you some more options. It creates friction in visitors’ minds. Moreover, drop down menus can encourage visitors to neglect the most important pages.

Exception: If you have an online ecommerce store that offers many sections, then drop down menu can improve usability.

Options that appear at the beginning or end on any list matter most. And your website navigation is no different. Some psychology studies suggest that, attention and retention are highest for items that display at the beginning and at the end. This is called serial position effect, and it is totally based on the standards of dominance and recency.

So, it is recommended to place all the important items in the order: most important items at the top, and least important items in the middle. Contact page should be your last item on the navigation, so placing it at the standard location that is far right in top level horizontal menu bar.

If you are not stay up-to-date with the latest web design trends and you are still strictly following the graphical, button-based menu, instead of text-based links, here are a few good reasons why you should not use buttons in your navigation.

· Buttons are difficult to update than links, demanding new image or software for every single update.

· Buttons are not search engine friendly, because the text it holds is non readable for search engines.

· Button takes more time to load than links, making them especially annoying for mobile users.