Essential Website Navigation Tips For Everyone

Website navigation is the most important element on your website. It is what everyone will use to get around your website, so you should focus on making the best. You should refine your navigation menu to make it easy for people to figure out what page is right for them. Follow these helpful tips for great website navigation.

website navigation tips to keep it simple

Keep it simple

You don’t need menus at the top of your site and on the sides, too. Keep it simple, organized, and compact. Structure your navigation so that it cascades from main topics to sub topics and down from there. If you have a lot of information and pages, a mega menu might be right for you. Otherwise, a short and sweet menu is best.

breadcrumbs website navigation

Breadcrumbs Are Super Helpful

Have you ever been on a website and wonder how you got to a page? Breadcrumbs are useful for letting users know where they are within their site. Also, if you have a lot of sub pages, breadcrumbs can help you ski a few levels and go back to a main section of the site. This is an excellent usability feature, because they can get where they want to go in less clicks.

Navigation at the Top of the Page is Best

You can have side navigation, depending on what is right for your particular website. However, most people will expect your main menu to be at the top of your website. You can make your menu really compact by using the hamburger icon, to keep things neat and tidy. These creative website navigation examples will give you some ideas.

3 Levels Deep Is Plenty

Even the biggest of websites usually stick to this rule. This keeps your navigation simple and uncluttered. Imagine clicking on a navigation menu where 4 and 5 level sub-menus start overlapping each other. That’s not very user friendly at all.

linking pages within your website

Do you need to link to deeper pages? Include links within your pages!

This is great for SEO, and it is user-friendly, too. Integrating links to other pages within your site helps Google see how certain pages and topics relate to each other, and why they are relevant to your topic. More important pages are likely to have more links, so they are seen as higher priority.

Avoid Javascript Effects and Non-standard technology

Your navigation menu should never rely on a chunk of code or software. There are people out there that browse the internet with javascript turned off. It’s okay to have hover effects and different actions based on javascript, just make sure to have a fall back in place so your menus show up for everyone.

Add Footer Navigation

Footer navigation is useful, because that is your last ditch effort to get someone to click on something they are interested in. I wouldn’t include all of my links there, but you should definitely list the most important links.

Final Thoughts

What do you think? Do you have any website navigation tips? Do you have a great example of website navigation you’d like to share? If so, share it in the comments section below.