Optimize Your Website’s Navigation Menu—Improve Engagement
The options you have in your website’s navigation menu have a big impact on your website visitor’s user experience.
So if you optimize your website’s navigation menu to comply with the desires of your website visitors, you will improve engagement with them.
When someone lands on your website for the first time, they are not committed to giving you much of their time, so you need your website’s navigation to be easy so you aren’t demanding much of their time.
Most websites have too many options in their navigation menus, causing decision fatigue for website visitors who can’t figure out what it is they should do next.
Many websites have a bunch of options that don’t help the visitor accomplish what they came to do. They have to search and deduce to find what they’re looking for, and at this point in the customer journey, they’re not willing to give you too much of their time, so they often bounce right off the website.
Your website visitors have to make thousands of decisions a day, and they’re being bombarded with marketing messages all day long.
When they sit down at their computers to search for information, they are looking for quick answers, and if they happen to land on your website, you want to make this possible.
Including every page on your website and multiple dropdown menus in your navigation makes it harder for your website visitors to navigate your website and find what they’re looking for, not easier.
The less you have in your navigation menu, the better.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how to configure your website’s navigation menu in order to improve your visitor’s user experience and improve engagement with your brand.
The KISS Principle
There’s an acronym I learned from a high school teacher of mine back in the 80s when people weren’t as easily offended as they are today.
The acronym is KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid.
If that acronym offends you, please know that I don’t actually think you’re stupid. It’s just an acronym.
I decided to Google the origins of this acronym and this is what I found in Wikipedia:
KISS, an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid!", is a design principle first noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.
BAM! ‘Nuff said.
Let’s apply the KISS principle to your website’s navigation menu, shall we?
How Should I Configure My Website’s Navigation Menu?
The navigation menu contains ‘options’ for your visitors to select from in order to navigate, or search, your website.
This is where you include links that will take your visitor to a specific page or section of a page or even, sometimes, off your website.
When determining what should go in your navigation menu, consider that there are 3 primary reasons someone landed on your website in the first place:
Informational: They were looking for an answer to a specific question or wanted to know more about a certain topic.
Transactional: Their intent is to buy something immediately.
Commercial: They intend to buy in the near future and they’re doing their research.
You want to make it easy for your visitors to accomplish any one of these tasks, so we’ll focus on your navigation menu to the extent that it helps your visitors avoid decision fatigue and easily find what they’re looking for.
Informational:
This is the most likely reason someone will land on your website. In this phase, your visitors are far from making a purchase, so having good information on your website is imperative to the customer journey. It builds trust and establishes you as an authority in what you do.
This is why a blog is so valuable to the success of your website as a tool for growing your business.
It is not your ‘About’ page. You might think it’s your About page, but it’s not. Your ‘About’ page is only a single page while your blog is a wealth of information, and information is gold.
The information your visitor is looking for has value to them, while your ‘About’ page does not (sorry, I know a bunch of you disagree with me on this one, lol). Unless you are one of the exceptions I discuss in this post, I do not recommend having an ‘About’ page. It’s fluff.
You can put any relevant information about yourself directly on your homepage, which is actually the most viewed page of a website, so put it there, and keep it short.
When someone is searching for information online or answers to specific questions, they are looking for a blog. That’s why blogs are so effective when they’re done right.
Once a visitor lands on your blog post, because it is the answer to the question they typed into Google, they can search for more valuable content by clicking on the navigation option that says “Blog.”
And it should say “Blog,” not something cute and clever that no one will understand.
If you have a food blog, it’s okay to name your blog ‘recipes.’ If your blog is a collection of book resources, it’s okay to call it ‘book resources.’
The point is, call it what it is.
Clarity is key. Confusion kills. Just call it what it is, and if it’s a blog, call it a blog.
Transactional:
If someone lands on your website because they are ready to buy from you, make it really damn easy to buy from you.
This means putting a strong call-to-action (CTA) on a prominent button displayed in the upper right corner of your website.
When I say “Strong” CTA, I mean use direct language like “Buy Now,” “Shop,” “Schedule a call,” “Book now,” and “Donate.” You don’t want to leave any room for doubt.
The last thing you want is a website visitor searching for a way to give you their money and having trouble finding it.
Avoid passive language like, “Learn more,” “Get in touch,” “Curious?” or “My Philosophy.” This is frustrating to users who are looking for the cash register and can’t find it because it’s hidden in the back room.
Commercial:
When a visitor is on your website because they are doing their due diligence before making a purchase, they will be looking for the value your product or services offer.
They will look for things like pricing and packages, in addition to taking a long look at your homepage if you’ve configured it to really grab them.
I put the value directly on the homepage of the websites I build, just below the section where I tell people the pain they are experiencing so they can contrast the pain points with the solutions.
People want to know what they are going to get for their hard-earned money. While including pricing on your website is a judgment call, and sometimes a tough one to make, you should still let people know all the value they will get when they do business with you.
Much of this can go directly on the homepage, but it’s a good idea to dedicate a page to this too because it is helpful for SEO.
This could be a ‘Services’ page, a ‘Packages’ page, a ‘Pricing’ page (that one always gets attention), a ‘Shop’ page (which is also your strong CTA), or anything that provides more details about your product or service.
What About the Other Pages on My Website?
You might have other pages you want your visitors to navigate to that I haven’t included above.
Most of these links can be integrated into the content of your website or footer links, but there are times when they need to go in the main navigation.
For example, if you’re a photographer, it would be a mistake not to include a portfolio in your navigation, because this is part of the due diligence your visitors in the “commercial” phase will need quick access to in order to complete their research.
Or if your website has a member area and your members need a place to log in, you’ll need to make it easy for them, but do not make the mistake of displaying this prominently on a button. Your navigation button is reserved for your strong CTA.
For some pages on your website, you can include links in your website’s content to guide your visitors to those pages that are relevant to them and assist them through the customer journey.
For example, I could put a link to a portfolio page on my services page. If someone is looking at my services, then they are willing to give me more of their time, and now I can direct them to my portfolio.
I can also put it in my footer–it’s okay to put more options there.
You might think ‘Contact’ should go in your header (because that’s conventional wisdom–and I ALWAYS question conventional wisdom), but you don’t.
Put it in the footer–everyone knows it’s there along with all your other contact information (social links, email, phone number, address, etc.)
And by the way, everyone knows your logo is the thing that will bring them back to home, so you don’t need to put ‘Home’ in your website’s main navigation.
What’s the Bottom Line?
The bottom line is this: only put those options in your website’s main navigation that will allow your website visitors to either
Collect information as it pertains to their specific inquiry (blog)
Is a direct line to buy from you, or
Allows them to do their research and due diligence as it pertains to your product or service before making a purchasing decision.
Any other pages can be linked to from internal links built into the content of your website and selected when your visitors are committed to giving you more of their time. They can also be included in your footer.
Was this helpful?
Agree? Disagree? Agree to disagree? Are you already doing this? Do you have a million options in navigation and wonder why no one is buying from you? Feel free to drop your comments below. 👇
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