Navigation, labels and links
Use the plain noun. Keep it to six items. And accept that the links inside your content get the clicks the menu does not.
Navigation problems on small sites are rarely about the menu. They are about having more pages than the business has things to say, which produces categories invented to hold them.
Name things as the visitor would
The most common fault, and the cheapest to fix. Menu labels written in the language of the business rather than of the reader: solutions, offerings, resources, our approach. A visitor scanning for what they came for does not find it, because it is filed under a word they would never have chosen.
Use the plain noun. Prices rather than investment. Articles rather than insights. What we do, or better, the actual thing you do. The test is whether somebody could predict what is behind the label before clicking.
Keep it short
- Five or six items is plenty for a small site. Beyond that the menu becomes a list to read rather than a thing to scan.
- Avoid drop-downs where you can. They are awkward on touch screens and they hide the structure from a reader who is skimming.
- Put the primary action in the navigation, visually distinct, and keep it there on every page.
- Do not include the home page as a menu item when the logo already goes there.
- Resist adding a menu item for each new page. A menu that grows with the site stops working at about seven.
Links inside the content do the real work
Navigation menus get the attention and in-content links get the clicks. A reader who has just finished an article about one thing is the best possible audience for the related thing, and a link at that moment is taken far more often than the same destination in a menu.
- Link from each article to the two or three that follow on from it, where it genuinely helps.
- Use the destination's own words as the link text, rather than click here, which tells a reader and a screen reader nothing.
- Link from your content to your offer, once, where it is relevant. An article that never mentions what you sell is a missed connection; one that mentions it in every paragraph is an advert.
- Check for broken links once or twice a year. They accumulate silently, and they are read as neglect.
URLs
Make them descriptive and permanent. A reader can tell what a page is from its address, which matters when it is shared. And once published, do not change them: if you must, redirect the old one to the new one permanently, one to one, rather than sending everything to the home page.
Avoid dates in URLs for anything you intend to keep updating, because an article with last year in its address looks stale regardless of when you last revised it.
The footer does real work
Treated as a dumping ground and used more than people assume, because it is where readers look when they have finished a page and want something: the address, the opening hours, the policy, the way to get in touch.
So put those there, plainly: contact details, location, hours if you have them, the policies you are obliged to publish, and the handful of pages that do not deserve a menu slot. It is also the right place for the things a visitor checks when deciding whether you are a real business, which is a surprising amount of what a footer is for.
Search, and when it is worth having
Worth it once you have enough pages that browsing is slower than asking, which for most small sites means a reasonable number of articles or products and not before.
If you do have it, read what people type. It is the most direct statement of what visitors want that you will ever get, and the searches that return nothing are a list of pages worth writing or products worth stocking. A search box nobody looks at the results of is a missed opportunity rather than a feature.
Breadcrumbs and knowing where you are
Useful once a site has sections rather than a flat list of pages, and nearly free. A single line at the top of the page showing the route to it tells somebody who arrived from a search where they have landed and offers a step up rather than only a step back. It is also one of the structured elements search engines read and display, which means it occasionally appears in the results in place of the raw address.
Work to do
- Read your menu labels and replace any that a visitor would not have guessed.
- Add two in-content links to each of your three most-visited articles.
- Run a broken link check and fix what it finds.