Helpful Tips to Improve Your Website Navigation

Have you put in time, money, and a lot of effort to create an amazing looking website? However, a great looking site doesn’t mean that your visitors are getting everything they want. In fact navigation can make or break the performance of your website when it comes to keeping visitors, ensuring they're engaged, and moving them through your conversion funnel.

Creating strong site navigation will make it easier for your visitors to find the information they are looking for quickly and eliminates the need to “hunt” the website, which can be frustrating and confusing. Good navigation will also help the search engines index the most important information effectively and efficiently.

Having consistent navigation will ensure ease of use and will increase your visitor’s ability to find the relevant information they are searching for faster. If your navigation changes from one page to another, your visitor will lose their “bearings” on your site and will have to reorient themselves on each page.

If you have navigation that contains several sections, sub-categories, or main categories, you need to make sure each one is clearly defined. This means that the category headings are separated visually from your sub-categories, even if your categories are actual links. This makes it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.

When you are using various categorical divisions throughout your navigation, all the heading elements need to be clickable links. This is even the case with the drop-down menus. After all, the natural inclination of many visitors is to simply click the sub-category link.

Your visitors need to have a general idea of what they will find on every page before they click the navigation link. This is necessary regardless of if it is an internal text link or a navigation link. Make sure you are using accurate text to help describe the linked page so that visitors are going to know what they will get.

If you use misleading or cryptic navigation text, this is going to annoy and possibly confuse your visitors. In some cases, they will abandon the site altogether. Be sure that all the link verbiage, regardless of if it is textual or an image, is able to properly portray all of the corresponding pages.

This is necessary for all your images, but even more necessary for images that are linking to another page on your site. Make sure you create the ALT attribute including descriptive text. By doing this, you are making sure that everyone is aware of what the link is, regardless of how they have decided to view your site.

If you offer an on-site search feature, make sure it works and produces relevant pages. You need to ensure it can compensate for any misspellings and that it shows related items. Make sure there is never a search result that reads, “no products found.”