Site usability should be one of your top considerations when building or maintaining a website. If your website is difficult to use, people will be discouraged from using it—or ever coming back. Furthermore, in many cases, good usability directly translates to better results when it comes to SEO.
Some of the hallmarks of good website usability include:
- Mobile responsiveness: More and more people are accessing the internet via their mobile phones (and Google decrees this as important for ranking on search as part of their mobile-first initiative).
- Page load speed: Yet another important ranking signal from Google, thanks to a correlation with how people interact with websites. According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less!
- Website navigation: According to Orbit Media Studios, if your website is easy to use and content is easy to find, this positively affects website traffic you’ll get from search engines. Gerry McGovern conducted a study with results demonstrating that 70% of people relied on navigation rather than search when looking for something because it’s easier and faster to click on links to specific pages within a website.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on usability in terms of website menu design, best practices, and menu design inspiration.
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Website Navigation
Web navigation is a general term that refers to the internal link architecture of a site. Above all else, its primary purpose is to help users easily find relevant content on your website. Your navigational structure also forms the basis for your website’s sitemap, which helps search engine giants like Google to index your website accordingly.
Certainly, there are several aspects that make up effective website navigation, but for now, we’ll be focusing specifically on the menu because this is usually the first-page element users interact with when they land on a new website.
Menu Navigation
Navigation menus tend to be located at the front and center of a website (figuratively speaking—a centered menu would be interesting, though). For websites with different categories, drop-down functionality is an option for conserving space and addressing the need for categorization.
Nowadays, in a show of minimalism (and mobile usability), many websites have adopted a hamburger menu design (essentially, a square with three short horizontal lines, indicating that the menu that can be expanded in a click).
Woocommerce’s Storefront theme provides a handy example, in the top right corner:
Hamburger website menu design is most prevalent when it comes to mobile website design, as developers are tasked with creating usable navigation in very small spaces. Certainly, it can be difficult to create a usable drop-down menu on mobile sites!
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This article was written by Maddy Osman and originally published on WPMU DEV Blog.