Website navigation for a small site should be boring

Aug 29
3 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Introduction

The menu contains items labelled Solutions, Approach, Insights and Connect. A visitor looking for prices, or for the list of services, has to guess which of those contains it, and guesses wrong at least once.

Navigation is not a place to demonstrate creativity. Its entire job is to let somebody find the page they came for without thinking about it, and every moment spent deciphering a label is a moment closer to leaving. Boring navigation converts better than interesting navigation, consistently and across every industry anybody has measured it in.

1. Website navigation for a small site should use ordinary words

The single highest-impact rule.

Services, Prices, About, Contact. These are understood instantly by everybody who has ever used a website, and no clever alternative has ever outperformed them for a small business. The creativity belongs on the pages, not on the route to them.

2. Keep the number of items small

Choice paralysis applies here too.

Five to seven top-level items is comfortable; twelve is a wall of text nobody reads. If everything seems essential, the underlying structure needs simplifying rather than the menu extending, and that is a decision about the business as much as about the website.

3. Avoid deep nesting

Depth buries pages.

Menus with three levels of submenu are difficult on a desktop and unusable on a phone. Anything important should be reachable within two clicks of the home page, and anything that cannot be is either less important than you thought or in the wrong place.

4. Put the most valuable pages in the menu

The menu is a statement of priority.

If your best-converting service is three levels down while a rarely visited page sits in the top row, the structure is working against the business. Review what the menu contains against what actually earns, at least once a year, because menus are usually set at launch and never revisited.

5. Make the phone menu genuinely usable

Where most visitors are.

Check that the menu opens and closes reliably, that items are far enough apart to tap, and that the whole list is reachable without awkward scrolling. Phone navigation is frequently tested least and used most.

6. Keep the contact route visible

Do not hide the thing people want.

A visible way to make contact, present on every page, rather than an item people must find in a menu. Many visitors arrive already intending to enquire and simply need the route.

7. Use the footer for the secondary items

A second tier that does not clutter the first.

Policies, careers, detailed sub-pages and administrative links belong there. It keeps the main menu focused while leaving everything reachable.

8. Be consistent across the site

Inconsistency erodes confidence.

The same menu, in the same place, on every page. Sections with their own separate navigation, or pages that drop the menu entirely, leave visitors unsure whether they are still on the same site.

9. Test with somebody who has never seen it

The only reliable evaluation.

Ask an unfamiliar person to find a specific page while you watch silently. Where they hesitate is your answer, and it is usually a label that made sense only to the people who chose it.

Check your analytics for what people search for on your own site. If a search box exists and is being used to find things that are in the menu, the menu is not communicating, and the search terms tell you exactly which labels to change.

Conclusion

Choose predictability over creativity, because navigation exists to be used rather than admired.

Use ordinary words like Services and Prices, keep the item count to five or seven, avoid deep submenus so nothing sits more than two clicks away, promote the pages that actually earn, test the menu thoroughly on a phone, keep a contact route visible on every page, move secondary links to the footer, stay consistent site-wide, and watch somebody unfamiliar try to find a page.