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Hi Reader,
One of my favorite things to do with a group is conducting website reviews. It's fun to give people tips they can take action on right away, and I see the same issues on websites over and over. One area that almost always needs help is the main shop navigation bar.
Navigation areas on an ecommerce site
Your website navigation is crucial for guiding visitors through your shop. They don’t know what’s going on yet, or where to go first, so this is your opportunity to guide them through the site yourself. Here are a few of my team's top tips for your shop navigation:
1. Prioritize your navigation
You need to guide your customers through your site. Your first few links in your header navigation should be the most important places you want customers to go. Usually, for an ecommerce site, these are shop categories. If you have space, consider adding your About page and a Contact link. The most important things should be in the main menu, and the rest can be organized neatly in the footer.
2. Order categories strategically
Since people read left to right in English, and what they see first is where they’ll likely go, it makes good sense to sort your navigation by importance. You can start with what you most want people to buy, what tends to sell best, or what makes most sense to look at first before shopping the rest of the site.
3. No need for a "home" link
We recommend not including a “home” link, as it takes up valuable real estate, and your logo lets people go back home. Also, why send customers backwards? You want them to head to the cart!
4. Make your main collections visible
We strongly recommend not hiding your shop collections behind the “shop” link. If, instead, you pull the collections out and display them, people can instantly see what you sell without having to hover or click. In the case that your site has many collections, you can divide them into broad groups and use subcollections in your menu. That helps orient your visitor right away without any work on their part.
5. Have no more than eight links
For the main shop navigation on your site, studies show that more than eight links across will slow your customers down. Also, if you have more than eight, there's a good chance your menu is too long to fit on one line and hard to read.
If you have more than eight main shop categories in your site's top navigation, pare them down to make it less overwhelming. Perhaps you can combine some collections into one broader collection.
6. Choose a menu type that works for your shop
If you only have a few categories without any subcategories, a row of links is fine. If you have subcategories, you'll likely want a mega menu, which is more elaborate and can show photos and multiple columns of links.
These are a few tips, but there's no definitive correct way to organize your header navigation. It will differ from shop to shop, and it's not an easy task. We often spend hours with a small team and a complicated spreadsheet planning out website navigation. It’s not something to take lightly! It's also good to check your data after any changes to see how customers are using your navigation. We like to check internal search data to see if there are common searches that should be added to your navigation.
There are so many details involved in creating a truly functional Shopify site. Shopify’s marketing materials make it sound easy, like you could get set up in a weekend—and you can! But you’ll likely be missing some important touches that boost sales. Shopify support won't be able to tell you how to create a streamlined product navigation that helps people find what they're looking for.
If you'd like some help with this, get in touch! Even with our simplest Shopify project, you'll get expert help with your navigation.
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