“With the Use of these website navigation best practices, your website provides an efficient way for search engines and users to find desired results.”
When you walk into your local grocery store or supermarket to search for some ingredients for your home like kitchen products, Tv launch sofa set, washroom products or any electronic products– for this you do a lot of searches and walk, sometimes it can become Headache.
However, online shopping has become one of the biggest trends worldwide, and brands are trying to facilitate the most straightforward discovery experience possible to the users. In many regards, eCommerce provides mimics experience at one digital place. Users can browse through available inventory according to their desire and products before finalizing a decision, and they can compare similar products.
However, digital shops also have many types of challenging tasks at hand. Unable to provide a fully user-friendly shopping experience where users often take their time and face issues interacting with dozens of products. To make a user-friendly website, brands personalize the shopping experience to maintain user engagement on the website. From the logo, and homepage banners, images, button colours, search bar, top bar, add to cart, to email subject lines design, everything dramatically affects users how long they remain on-site, and they will complete a purchase. All the things that we have discussed above it are called easy to navigate optimization.
What is navigation optimization?
Navigation optimization improves website performance for visitors and search engines to find and access the desired information. Easy to navigate optimization includes the site’s taxonomy, labelled menus, and how pages are structured and designed on both desktop and mobile. All these components tremendous impact the overall end-user experience and can also increase or decrease metrics like time on site, return visitors, conversions, search ranking, bounce rate, page views, and more. So, keep reading to take a closer look at the details.
Scroll down the various components and examples of site navigation
Primary navigation
It is the backbone of your eCommerce navigation strategy that how you present your header. The two most common formats of menus must be fixed either horizontally or vertically to expose a handful of categories of products, but it varies from site to site. Let’s assess the variables that will likely impact:
- Page space
- Menu item priority
- Scanning
Categories
For making a user-friendly experience, Navigation structure and labelling must be clear and concise across all pages; according to the search, 34% of eCommerce sites do not offer “thematic” product browsing on mobile, which make it difficult for users to find the desire products what they are looking for. That is why brands must display a few top-level categories. However, your navigation menu’s subcategories are an essential part of the navigation experience.
There are two primary and beneficial methods where the brands typically go about this design:
- Tiered menus: List parent categories and only expose subcategories upon hover or click
- Mega menus: Lays out all parent and subcategories upon initial menu dropdown
Look at an example of an eCommerce navigation menu of a tiered approach where subcategories are only exposed upon the click
Some other elements should take into consideration:
- STICKY NAVIGATION
- DESIGN STYLE
- MENU RENDERING
- FOOTER
The various types of search functionalities
eCommerce sites also have access to several additional strategies to optimize site navigation. These shops must have two primary options: faceted search and semantic search.
Faceted search
Faceted search helps users analyse, organize, and filter large sets of product inventory based on filters such as price, brand, size, and colour.
Semantic search
Semantic search uses for geolocation and helps spelling variations to improve search queries.
Additional tips catered toward easy mobile navigation design
Your mobile site experiences must be as seamless as the desktop experience. Because millions of people are making purchases on mobile devices than ever. So, make sure all navigation optimizations render correctly across your mobile inventory and incorporate mobile-first optimizations.
Start testing your way to site navigation success.
There’s no universal blueprint for developing a Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce Navigation site, especially in the eCommerce industry. So, it’s vital to test different navigation design elements and, of course, always professional QA your website experiences to ensure they are working in the ways you intend.