Make it easy to navigate around your pages

Optimise menus, links, buttons and search functionality so users can intuitively navigate and find their way around your pages.

We spend around 3 seconds on a website before we give up and leave if we don’t find what we’re looking for. That’s why clear and intuitive navigation is essential.

‘Where am I?’, ‘Where did they put xx?’ and ‘Why do they call it that?’ are questions our users shouldn’t find themselves thinking when they move around our sites.

Therefore, navigation on and between pages must be intuitive so that users don’t think at all, but simply ‘do’.

We ensure this by optimising:

Menus
Links and buttons
The search feature.

The first step in optimising your menu structure is to evaluate the current structure to identify any problems or challenges.

You can find info about user behaviour on your pages via the statistics tool Siteimprove and/or by having some users find specific content on your pages and noting their challenges. If real users are unavailable, ask a few co-workers who aren’t familiar with the pages.

Learn more about how to find web statistics in Siteimprove.
Learn more about how to research your users.

It’s also a good idea to review your pages yourself and consider, among other things:

Is there outdated content?
Is there redundant information?
Missing information or topics?
Are there pages with too little text that can be moved?
Do users have to click many times?

If you need to build a new menu structure, it’s a good idea to do it in Excel or with post-its, so you can easily move menus around and make corrections before deciding on the right optimisation.

General tips for menus

Use a flat hierarchy: It’s a good idea to avoid too many layers and group content on fewer pages, e.g. by using the accordion component.
Use clear names: Use language that’s easy for users to understand, and avoid technical or implied terms.
Lead the way with teaser texts: Use the teaser to describe the content of the page it leads to concisely and clearly. Use a few words or a short sentence to describe what the user can expect to find.
Prioritise the most important content: Make sure important content is placed at the top and easily accessible in your menu.

Read about what accordions can do and how to insert them (PDF).

Internal links improve the visibility of important content across pages. Therefore, you should consider links when optimising your navigation, as they can improve both the user experience and the searchability of your pages on Google.

Consider whether you can:

link to pages with more info about the topic of the page. For example, under the Menus tab on this page, we have mentioned accordions and linked to a guide on how to insert accordions.
link to pages with related content. Related content is content that the user might also be interested in, or which the user may have been looking for instead of what is featured on your page. For example, at the bottom of this page there are links to other guides on how to optimise websites.

When scanning the page to find what we’re looking for, links capture our attention. Therefore, the link text must catch our attention, even if users haven’t read the rest of the content in the section or on the page.

A few tips for links:

Avoid marking up single words in sentences as links – links in the middle of the text disrupt the reading flow and rarely give a complete picture of where one ends up when clicking something.

Link texts can be full sentences. The longer the link texts are, the easier they are to identify. ‘Read more’ or ‘Click here’ are not adequate link texts.

You don’t need to explain how to do it, but where the user will end up when clicking.

Links should be located on a separate line below the paragraph so you can write a thorough link text.

Elaborate on how the user benefits from clicking the link. Use imperative verbs, e.g. ‘read about’, ‘sign up’, etc. to encourage action (that is, clicking on the link).

Specify the format in your link if it does not lead to a subpage but to a PDF download, for example.

Don’t write: Read more about how to engage your users here.

Rather: Learn more about how to engage your users.
In addition to text links, you can also guide the user further with buttons.

One button per page is often sufficient, as buttons are very prominent and should represent the primary action the user needs to take. Having multiple prominent buttons may confuse the user.

For us, the Big CTA Button is a component that functions as a button.

Learn more about what the Big CTA Button is and how to use it (PDF)
Dead links are a high priority when working with web pages.

When a user encounters a dead link and a 404 error page, it disrupts or slows down their path through your pages. It’s also very detrimental to searchability on Google.

You can view a comprehensive list of any dead links and fix them in our analytics tool Siteimprove.

Learn more about how to use Siteimprove to detect and fix dead links

A search feature requires continuous maintenance to function optimally.

To optimise the navigation from the search feature to your pages, you can do the following:

Find out what keywords your users are typing to find your pages. Ask yourself: Who will be reading this page and why? What questions will they have? From this exercise, you can jot down words, phrases and topics that you can use as keywords.
Test which search results appear for different keywords. Are the relevant pages displayed and in the optimal order? If not, write to [email protected] and put Search Optimisation in the subject line. We can make certain pages appear for certain keywords and change the order of search results.

Learn more about how to find relevant keywords and optimise your searchability on Google.