Website navigation is important to guide users through the website and help to grow your website's SEO performance. Good website navigation allows your site to gain higher conversion rates and better visibility on the search engines. In this mission to enhance your websites, let us learn about some of the best ways to improve website navigation.
Why is Website Navigation Important?
Website navigation should be understandable, clear, and analytical. It should:
Following are some of the best practices that will help to improve Website Navigation:
1. Easy Approach Towards Navigation Bar:
A website menu should effortlessly grab user attention. The location of the navigation bar should be foreseeable, usually at the header or upper right/left corner of the sidebar. A good color and contrast guideline will help you improve the visibility of your menu.
2. Mobile-Friendly Navigation:
Place your menu bar in a way that is easy to use on mobile devices. For various reasons, the first mobile indexing was implemented by Google so that the search option uses the mobile indexing version of the website.
3. Clear & Narrative Navigation Titles:
Name your menu items clearly, so that it explains the contents in the page in easy & descriptive language. Your audience should get what they are searching when they click on the page menu links. Clearly typed URLs also improve web access for visitors who trust screen readers. Ultimately, to improve your SEO, do not forget to use relative keywords.
4. ALT text for Images:
Providing ALT texts to improve ecommerce website navigation is another practice to get easy web access for the users. Images must contain ALT text that describes their content on the linked page.
5. Simple Navigation:
If your website is not an online marketplace or a hypermarket, navigation must be as simple as possible. Make sure you do not confuse or mislead your audience with their choice of decisions. Do not use more than 7 to 8 options in the main menu. The lists on the menu should reflect your most important and desirable options.
6. Using Breadcrumbs:
Breadcrumbs help visitors to keep track of website programs & documents. It is a graphical control element that uses navigational assistance for user interfaces and web pages. If your website design is complex, use breadcrumbs as they can improve user experience. Breadcrumbs are navigation items that look like clickable threads. They offer links back to previous pages where the user navigated once.
7. Try Sticky Navigation Bar:
Sticky navigation bars with descriptive components and sections act as navigation titles for an application or a website. In the mobile view, the sticky navigation bar starts to squeeze and expands horizontally with the height of the view width. Most website designers would agree that a website should have descriptive navigation.
8. Divide Categories and Sub-categories:
If you can't avoid both categories & sub-categories on the website, they must get separated. Using the UX design elements such as color and contrast, you can design the changes in describing those categories. So the icons used to display the categories can help to improve the site's usability.
9. Add a Fat Footer:
A usual footnote is limited to contact information and social links. Most websites have fat footers that contain backlinks to their main pages. In most cases, the footer attachment repeats the same as the header. A fat footnote can be helpful for visitors who want to remember something or decide to search for something.
10. Link your Logo to the Home page:
A basic rule in the World Wide Web (WWW) is that your logo must be associated with your home page. When visitors want to go back to where they started, they click the logo image and expect them to return to the home screen.
11. Design a Sitemap for Your Websites Visitors:
There is a win-win situation if you provide your visitors with a sitemap before they start to explore your website. This way, you can make your website more functioning for the visitors and help the search engine crawlers to get in and index the web pages.
Last but not least!
There can be no identical websites. Each site needs to have its known method of navigation. A lot of website navigation depends on your products/services, industries, priorities, etc. The specialists, designers, SEO experts, and front-end developers at our digital agency have the capability and skills to improve website navigation.
