The navigation menu of any website is largely responsible for providing its users with the best or worst experience.
If the navigation menu on your website is not intuitive, your visitors may find it difficult to browse through and as a result, they may quit your website immediately.
In this blog post, I have shared 5 mistakes that you must avoid to have in your website menu in order to enhance the user-experience. You will also find the solutions to fix these mistakes, if applicable to your website.
Let’s get started, shall we?
5 Mistakes to avoid in your navigation menu
#1 Too many items
If your website menu has too many items, it could be very confusing for the users. Therefore, you must limit the number of items in the menu.
Solution:
What’s a good number to follow?
It would be really a good idea to have a maximum number of 6 items in your menu, however lesser would be even better.
#2 Menu with unconventional style
Some website designers try to play around with the design of menu in order to get a modern & trendy look. But this approach can sometimes affect the user-experience on your website.
Most of the internet users are comfortable browsing a website in the traditional way.
For example, you can find many websites these days that have a hamburger menu instead of a traditional one. Do you think that all of the website visitors are able to recognize this menu icon and click it to view the list of items? I don’t think so.
Even if 75% of your total website visitors are able to identify this modern & trendy menu icon, you are still losing 25% of your audience. Displaying a hamburger menu for your responsive design (on mobiles) is still fine, but using it for desktops may not be a good idea.
Solution:
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You must request your website developer to use the traditional way of displaying menus so that your users don’t find it confusing.
#3 Bad contrast
What’s the background color of your menu and what’s the font color that your website designer has used for the menu items? Although this question may seem to be unimportant, but it may have a significant effect on your website’s viewership.
For example, I have noticed on many websites that use dark blue color for the menu background and light blue as the menu’s font color. This may not be a good contrast for your users.
Solution:
Ideally, if the color of your menu background is dark, then its font color must be light and vice versa. Your web designer can help you to choose appropriate colors for a better contrast between menu background and menu fonts.
#4 Complicated drop down
Have you ever seen on any website that has dozens of drop-down links and you got confused which link you must click? I am sure you did.
Especially on some of the e-commerce websites, you can see the links from all the categories and sub-categories. It will do no good to your website. Instead, it will affect the user-experience badly.
Solution:
If your website also have lots of links, you must get it fixed right away. Try to showcase the links only from the top-level of categories.
#5 Lack of mobile-friendly menu
Is your website’s navigation menu mobile-friendly?
Are the mobile users able to navigate your website easily?
If you are not sure, you must check the responsiveness of your website. And if you find that there is some issue in the accessibility of your menu over mobile devices, it’s probably an alarming situation for you.
Why mobile responsiveness is so important?
More than 60% of the internet users browse websites using their smart devices such as phones & tablets. If your website lacks responsiveness, you may be losing a lot of sales & conversions.
Solution:
Hire a website developer to fix the responsiveness of your website. Given that more than 60% of your website visitors may be accessing your website using their smart devices, it’s more than important to have a responsive website.