How to Optimize Your Website Navigation for Increased Engagement and Conversions

A potential customer lands on your website, ready to buy. But instead of smoothly finding their way to checkout, they’re stuck, lost in a maze of confusing menus and broken links. What do they do? They leave. And just like that, you’ve lost a sale. Today, we’re tackling one of the most overlooked aspects of web design—navigation. I’ll walk you through the do’s and don’ts of website navigation so your site becomes a seamless experience that keeps visitors engaged and converts them into customers.


Mentioned Resources

ADA Compliance

-> EP 004: The Accessible Website: ADA Compliance Unveiled


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Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:48

Have you ever gone to a website and just clicked away so fast you didn't even realize what you did. Why do you think that's the case? Many times, it is the customer navigation that is one of the key elements above the fold that is really important for customer conversion and customer satisfaction. Today, we're tackling one of the most overlooked aspects of website design, and that is navigation. Like I mentioned, I'll walk you through the do's and don'ts of website navigation so your site becomes a seamless experience that keeps visitors engaged and converts them into customers much more easily.

Carrie Saunders: 1:26

Welcome to the eCommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry, and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the show.

Carrie Saunders: 2:00

Today, we're talking about website navigation and why it is so important for customer satisfaction and customer conversion. It is one of the first things your customers see when they come to your website. It isn't just a design element. It is one of the first things that your customers see when they come to your website. It isn't just a design element. It is actually the backbone experience for your user, and a clear, intuitive navigation menu could be the difference between someone staying on your site or bouncing off of it forever and never coming back. So why do we need we've touched on some of it, but why do we need a great customer navigation menu? It really helps keep your customers engaged. When they don't feel confused, when they don't feel lost, they're going to keep looking through your site, especially if they find it interesting. It really guides them towards taking the next desired action as well, and a bonus is it relates to search engine optimization. If it's well-structured, it can help guide major search engines like Google and Bing through your website and show them what are the most important pages on your website. So having it structured well actually helps you for search engine optimization as well. 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to site after a bad experience, and navigation is often the culprit, which is why this is a super important but many times very simple element to fix on your website.

Carrie Saunders: 3:23

So let's jump into some of those do's. What are the things we actually want to do on our website? What are the good things we need to have? So, first, we want to avoid vague terms and have intuitive terms. So this is where we come back to our theme that we tend to have in this podcast episode we want to be clear and not clever, so we want to use intuitive labels, like about shop contact services. You know, if you're a service provider, that would be one. We want to make sure these are all very clear.

Carrie Saunders: 3:54

We also want to have only about five to seven items on our menu. We want to avoid overwhelming visitors. There are a few exceptions to this and those are very large e-commerce sites. You may need more, like 10. I would not go too much more than 10, but you might need more like 10 or so. As long as you have them well organized, it's probably still going to work pretty well and I've seen it actually be very successful for some of our clients.

Carrie Saunders: 4:20

But we want to, in general, keep it about five to seven items to avoid overwhelming our visitors, and I highly recommend that you have the about and the contact as being one of those or two of those menu items across the top. Generally we find these off to the right side of the top because we want to make sure it's easy. If they want to learn more about you and your business, that's really easy to find from the about link and if they have questions or want to contact you, we want to make sure that that contact link is right up there at the top. If both of these are missing one or both of these are missing, that's going to erode some trust in the customer. If it's not easy to find out more about you and easy to find out how to contact you, that's going to affect your trust factors. We want to make sure that's right up there at the top. We also want to be making sure we're making it mobile friendly and I stress this a lot on the podcast. But we want to make sure we're testing for mobile, make sure it works seamlessly on tablets, mobile devices of many different types, and many times we use what's called a hamburger menu for that. It's a collapsible menu with three lines kind of looks like a really flat, squished hamburger. So make sure that you're having something intuitive like that that users are used to seeing, such as a hamburger menu when they're on.

Carrie Saunders: 5:38

And then we want to also get in the heads of our customers. Think about them. What do they really want to find first? What's in their curiosity? Why do they come to your website? What do they want to find first? So get in their heads and think about that and make sure that your navigation meets that. And then, if you have a lot of pages, I highly recommend having a search function at the top, especially if you have a blog or an e-commerce store obviously needs a search function, but I feel like blogs do too. I find a lot of websites that have blogs that don't have a search function. For those blogs, having a search function is really important as well to have up there in the navigation.

Carrie Saunders: 6:19

So some things we don't want to do is we don't want to overcrowd our menu. We talked earlier about having about five to seven, maybe a little bit more as an exception. If you're an e-commerce store with a lot of items and we want to make sure that we have it nice and clear and clean and not overcrowded, and also overcrowding can happen even if you only have five to seven items. If you have all the menu items squished together without proper spacing to make it easy for our eyes to scan, then that's going to also have that perception of being overcrowded as well. And then we also don't want to have an overly complex or hidden or weird navigation structure on our website. So you know, multiple dropdowns and flyouts and things like that. I would recommend maybe one drop down, slash, fly out thing. If you're an e-commerce store and you have a lot of products and categories, that's probably fine, but you need to make sure that even those, each element needs to be nice and clear and not clever, and well organized, well spaced out so it's easy for the user to scan and see what they're looking for.

Carrie Saunders: 7:24

And then we also want to make sure that we are testing our navigation for accessibility. This is highly important now and forever, as we want to make sure that we are up-to-date on our web accessibility standards. And we will link in the show notes to our accessibility podcast that we did earlier on when we first started the podcast and that has some great links to some resources on where you can find the latest information on accessibility. And when we're doing this, we want to make sure we're including keyboard navigation, which means that they can use your website without using a mouse. So they can just use the keyboard to get through your website and tab through everything and select pages without a mouse.

Carrie Saunders: 8:08

And then we also want to make sure it's screen reader compatible. So what that means is, for those that have an eyesight impairment, we want to make sure that it can read your website back to them and in the order this is really important and in the order that you would visually expect to see it. So if you're a person who has good eyesight and you can see the order of your menu, you want to make sure that the screen reader reads it in that same order. And if our structure of our website isn't built properly, sometimes it'll jump around. The screen reader won't jump around because it doesn't know which comes first. It's a little bit more advanced, but it's something I highly recommend you go looking up, because it is the law and it is something very important because we want to make sure our websites are accessible to all and we also want to make sure we're not burying key pages. So make sure essential pages are one or two clicks away. I highly recommend one if it is actually essential, just like the about and the contact us page. I talked about making sure those are one click away, very easy to find.

Carrie Saunders: 9:10

Now, some that you might want to have maybe not at the top kind of depends upon your store and your services is a shipping or and or return policies. Sometimes you'll see there's links at the top and that's also okay to put them at the bottom. I find that consumers, if they don't see them at the top, they're going to look at the bottom, so that's something we don't want to bury. We do want to have directly linked on the page, whether it's at the top or the bottom, and so that's something to consider is not burying that. And then we also don't want to use confusing labels.

Carrie Saunders: 9:43

We don't want to be using jargon unless that's the purpose of your website. If your target is people who use the jargon and they expect to see the jargon, that's basically the only time you want to use jargon on your website. Otherwise, we want to make sure we're back to that clear, not clever, type of language. We want to make sure it's clear, easy to read, easy to scan, easy to, and then we have some bonus navigation tips that can really help you like, even take it a step further, and this is something I find that we aren't having nearly as much on websites lately is breadcrumbs, and what that basically means is, let's say, you went to the homepage, you clicked on services and then you click on one on one consulting. Well, you just went through three steps on the website. So breadcrumb would show home services and then one-on-one consulting in a row, and it's not really very big text. Honestly, it's a very subtle thing, but it shows you how you went through the website.

Carrie Saunders: 10:41

Kind of like when you go into a store, you walk in the door, you're going to walk down a couple. You know, walk past a couple aisles and then go down one of the aisles. Well, in your mind, you know walk past a couple aisles and then go down one of the aisles. Well, in your mind, you visually just seen that you went through the door. You walked through the store, walked past a couple aisles and went down, let's say, aisle three. So you know as a person where you just went. Well, this helps them visualize where they just went.

Carrie Saunders: 11:03

When you have it on your website, it's something that it's a nice to have. I think it can really help, especially if you have a lot of pages. And then we want to make sure we're highlighting the current page, make sure it's obviously know where they are, make sure they still know that they're in aisle three in the store right, make sure it's not confusing on where they are. And then always testing your navigation. Make sure you're always testing it on multiple devices. Have other people test your navigation that aren't familiar with your website. Have some business friends or some just in-person friends, and then we also want to make sure we're keeping it updated.

Carrie Saunders: 11:37

This is really important. I want to make sure that you are auditing this regularly Now regularly for you could be once a year, could be twice a year, could be once a month. It really depends upon how much your website's changing as the year goes by. But I'd want to make sure you don't never check it, because what if you change something simple on your? You've changed something and you didn't update your navigation or reflect it, and now your customers can't find it or they get confused. You know why is this page here. Maybe you don't offer the service anymore, but the page is still there. We want to make sure that things like that don't happen, which is why at least checking it once or twice a year is a really good idea.

Carrie Saunders: 12:21

Okay, so let's recap this episode. We want to make sure that we are keeping our navigation simple and have it user-friendly and accessible. Those are the three pillars of a great website navigation, and great website navigation directly impacts conversions and customer satisfaction. Nobody wants to be confused when they go to your website. They want to feel at home. They want to feel natural to them, so make sure we make them feel comfortable at home and know exactly where they are All right. So that's all we have for this week's episode of the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. I hope you enjoyed this show. If you find this this helpful, make sure you're sharing it with a business friend as well. That helps them out and helps us get the word out better to help others, and we will see you next week.