What makes a website easy to navigate?
Congratulations, you’re making a website (or rejigging your current one)!
You have a plan. You’ve got the vision. But just hold your horses one second there… Have you thought about the practical side of your beautiful new site? Is it going to be straightforward for your audience to use?
An easy-to-navigate website should be part of the master plan when it comes to web creation (and we’ll go into why that is in two ticks). There are four things you’ll want to remember when making a website that’s seamless to follow:
limit the number of options
collate the info that can be collated
write clear, signposting copy
keep your design fairly simple
Why?
Because, at its core, a website is a map, and following these steps will help users to find what they’re looking for (or the info you want them to discover) without unnecessary bumbling around, tears of frustration, and ultimately a high chance of them giving up and heading over to a different site.
So, making your website easy to navigate isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s actually super important if the website is going to serve the whole purpose of its existence (and you wouldn’t want to deny it that).
But wait: there’s more.
Not only does a clear, concise and well-signposted website convert users into clients, visitors or supporters; it’s also important for accessibility.
A higgledy-piggledy homepage is tricky enough to navigate for most of your audience, but if a web user is relying on a screen reader, for example, it’s going to be even harder for them to find what they need if your website hasn’t been planned with intention.
One more point to add before we get to the dos and don’ts. A well-structured website is also a whole lot easier for search engines (including AI programmes) to understand. That means it’ll work wonders for your SEO, making your website much more likely to rank in search results and to pop up in chatbot answers.
Alright, let’s get down to the good stuff.
How to make your website easy to navigate
1. Limit the number of options
We’ve all been there.
You stick the TV on for a film night and are still scrolling through every single option on Netflix, no closer to deciding what to watch, half an hour later.
But if your friend had simply turned up with a tub of popcorn and the 2005 Pride and Prejudice as your only option, you’d have happily been somewhere between the first dance and Mr Collins’ excellent boiled potatoes by now.
Choice paralysis is a thing.
The more options we have, the more we question what we’re supposed to do. On an art gallery’s website, for example, should visitors go for ‘Book your tickets’, ‘Visit the gallery’, or ‘Plan your visit’ to get started?
In this case, it could mean a website user spends 10 minutes skimming info about parking and lunch spots on the ‘Plan your visit’ page, when they just wanted to know your opening hours over on ‘Visit the gallery’.
It’s not a good start to their experience with your organisation.
The best websites I’ve worked on don’t overload users with lots of menus or sub-menus. Bright Digital points out that our short-term memories can only comfortably remember seven items at once, so limiting your navigation bar to seven headings is a good rule of thumb.
I see a lot of websites which have sub-headings for their sub-headings. Sub-sub-headings if you will. I’d advise against these sub-sub-headings, as it presents users with too much choice.
If possible, I’d even suggest avoiding sub-headings. Instead, link to further information on the pages themselves.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a great example of this in action.
They have six options up top, with no drop-down sub-headings. Let’s say you click ‘Support us’: it takes you to the main ‘Support us’ page. And it’s there, once you’re on this page, that you’ll find block links to all the ways visitors can support the organisation.
Doing it this way means the options can be spaced out and accompanied by images, making them easier to take in and understand. (You’ll also spot this is what I’ve done over on my own ‘Services’ page!)
It’s neat, it’s clear and it makes for a pleasant user journey.
2. Collate the info that can be collated
Number two on the list links very nicely with number one, because in order to limit your options, it’s useful to collate some of the information they contain.
You could take a leaf out of Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s book in the above example, and group relevant links on one page for each menu option.
You could even go one step further and give users all the information they need on that one page, without linking off to other parts of your website.
One client I worked with, Animo PR, nailed this approach.
They were sure from the start that they wanted their new website to be clear and concise, so they combined elements of the site where other businesses might have split them into separate pages.
Take their ‘About’ page, for instance. Instead of having a separate page for ‘About’, ‘Our values’ and ‘Meet the team’, all this information is gathered into one, useful ‘About’ page. The themes work well together, so it makes sense to group them in short – but meaningful – sub-sections of the same page.
Other common information that you could collate, rather than giving each heading a separate page, could be:
services; specialties; case studies
our history; about us; meet the team
our work; services; products
plan your day; explore the wider area; food and drink
opening hours; contact details; getting here
Of course, what information you group together depends on the nature of your organisation, but these should give you an idea.
The next step is to be a little merciless with your editing.
Grab a pair of (metaphorical) secateurs and go to town on your copy, keeping only the important, genuinely engaging and truly relevant info for each section.
This is crucial so that web users don’t end up scrolling through reams of text and forget what they came to find in the first place.
The ‘Visit’ page for Haddon Hall, for instance, details times and prices, food and drink, parking, directions, tours, stays, and other key points to help people plan their visit – all on one page! But because they’ve kept each section concise, it works well and doesn’t feel overwhelming.
If you need help rewriting a large and sprawling website into manageable, tighter copy, please feel free to drop me a message.
This takes us onto the next tip…
3. Write clear, signposting copy
If you’re cutting down your on-page copy, it’s important to be sure that the words you do use are well-chosen.
With every call to action, every menu heading, every chunk of text, you’re giving web users the information they need to take the next step. Your website is a map, remember.
It’s why ambiguous copy will slow your visitors down and make your website harder to navigate.
Let’s say you look after the website for a heritage destination, such as a castle. You might have a menu option entitled ‘Learn’, which takes you to a page all about the school workshops you offer.
But some visitors might click that ‘Learn’ button expecting to discover all about the castle itself, who lived there, and how many dragons they had.
Something like ‘Educational visits’ or, simply, ‘School trips’ would be much better here to make it obvious from the start where the button leads.
Another easy trap to fall into is to have options that are too similar, so website visitors don’t know which to click.
I saw an example of this recently.
A website (I won’t name names!) had both ‘Working with us’ and ‘Careers with us’ as sub-menu headings. On the surface, these sound like the same thing, so which do you choose?
The first should really have been labelled ‘Partner with us’ and the second should have been ‘Job opportunities’ - but I only discovered that’s what they were about once I clicked on them.
In some cases, ambiguities like this prevent website visitors from finding what they came to find – meaning you lose out on their support or custom as a result.
One more top tip on making your website text super clear is to have appropriate headings for on-page copy.
As much as it breaks my heart as a website copywriter, a lot of people don’t actually read a website page from top to bottom. They skim it to find the information they’re looking for. So, if you can divide that text into sections and include a signposting heading for each one, you’ll be doing them a huge favour.
This could even be presented as what’s called an ‘accordion’, where web users click the heading they want to read more about, and the text (otherwise hidden) drops down beneath it, limiting distractions on the page.
Take a look at how the Brontë Parsonage Museum uses the accordion feature to give bitesize introductions to the Brontës’ novels.
And never forget: just because something is useful, doesn’t mean it has to be boring…! A good copywriter can think up clear, indicative headings, menu options and calls to action that are also memorable, engaging and all-round inspiring if that suits your branding.
4. Keep your design fairly simple
Now, I’ll make my final point brief, as I’m a copywriter rather than a web designer. All the same, I’ve seen enough wacky websites in my time to know that some are easier to navigate than others.
It’s tempting to employ a few ‘out there’ design features – moving images, sliding text, lagging cursors – to make your website memorable. But, sometimes, these additions over-complicate things and make it harder to know where to look.
Now, for the record, I’m all for funky website designs that pull users in and make them want to stay on the site. More of this!
However, a website that’s crowded with heaps of images or different fonts or flashing colours can make it really hard to focus on the important information you want users to discover.
There are ways to make a quirky, creative website that don’t sacrifice how easy it is to navigate – and there are very clever web designers who can help you do that! (Kota covers what works and what doesn’t work in a little more detail here, with some great examples of immersive websites.)
Hopefully that’s given you some food for thought on how to make your website easy to navigate.
But before you click that big, exciting ‘publish’ button and release your new website into the world wide web, my final piece of advice is to test the user journey yourself.
Think about the different types of people who’ll be visiting your website and why, and map out the journeys they’ll need to take to find what they want to find.
Have a go at getting from A to B and test how intuitive it is.
And if it’s still looking a little confusing and unclear, I’d love to help out with some purposeful copy that brings your messaging into focus.
Send me a note to get started!
