Building Your Website: Basic Site Navigation

When you’re launching your website, it’s a good idea to think about how you want people to interact with your brand online. That’s where navigation design, which helps visitors move around your website, comes into play. Whether you’re starting a blog, selling online, or creating a portfolio of your work, website navigation can make or break the effectiveness of your website design.

Here’s everything you need to know about website navigation design, including best practices and examples to help you build an online presence that serves you and your website visitors.

What is website navigation design?

Navigation design is the sum of all the elements that people use to navigate a website. It includes:

• Main navigation bar or website header

• Dropdown menu or hamburger menu

• Main menu items

• Call-to-action (CTA) buttons and copy

• Internal links

• Web page layouts

• Website footer menu

• Search bar

The more user-friendly your website is and the easier it is for visitors to find what they need, the more people will want to stick around and start building a relationship with your brand—which is why good website navigation is so important.

When it’s done right, navigation user experience (UX) is intuitive. Ideally, visitors will have such an easy time finding what they need that they won’t even think about the site navigation design. If your site has ineffective navigation design, it might cause people to leave your site because they can’t find what they’re looking for. That impact on site visitors will result in fewer interactions with your products and offerings and lower conversion rates overall.

Every Squarespace website template sets you up for success with a built-in navigation structure and optimized UX to help you highlight important pages and page features.

Best practices for website navigation

There isn’t one right way to approach your design, but there are website navigation best practices to guide you as you build, test, and evolve your website structure.

Lead with your goals

Is your main goal to sell products? Encourage signups to build your mailing list? Your navigation should support the primary action you want your visitors to take when they get to your website. This can be as simple as making decisions like ecommerce sites choosing to bold the word “Shop” in the website navigation menu so it stands out for visitors.

Make your menu obvious

Make sure your primary navigation menu is easy to see when people first land on your website, ideally at the top of the page or as a sidebar. Think of your website navigation as a digital map—it’s best to give your visitors obvious, clear directions that they can easily understand. Choosing to place your navigation bar at the bottom of your homepage, or hiding it as a dropdown menu from your logo can create confusion for visitors who want to quickly find what they need. 

Use direct language

There’s a time and place for creative copywriting, but site navigation copy should always be to the point. If you’re offering online workshops, make your CTA as simple as “Browse workshops,” or “Sign up for a workshop.” Phrasing like “Join our community” or “Start learning” might be unclear for visitors, and ultimately lead to fewer signups for your courses.

Test your approach

Measure the usability of your website navigation by putting it to the test. Ask a few friends to click around your website and note where they get lost or confused. Make sure you ask them to click around on both desktop and mobile devices, and get specifics about the source of any confusion. Is it the language on your website? The placement of your navigation bar? A dead link? The more specifics you can get, the easier it will be to improve your navigation system.

Keep it simple

Above all else, keep your navigation simple. The more complicated it is for people to find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to leave—and the less likely they are to return. From the language you choose to the placement of your navigation bar and menu design, make it easy for people to move around your website.

Examples of great navigation UX

When you’re creating your website, make sure it has the key elements of effective navigation UX. Here are a few key features you’ll find in strong web navigation examples.

Responsive design

A website with great navigation will adapt to different devices. Whether someone looks at your website on their phone, a tablet, or a desktop computer, it should always look clean and organized, and have a consistent menu. Make sure your website has responsive design so that your navigation bar, images, CTA buttons, and other content stays consistent across every device.

Sticky navigation bar

A sticky navigation bar will always appear at the top of your website, making it easy for visitors to get where they need to go, no matter what device they’re using. To adapt to smaller screens, like a smartphone, your sticky navigation might appear as an icon with a dropdown menu in the upper right or left corner of a person’s screen. 

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are small text links, usually in the upper left corner of a person’s screen that show where that specific page lives within the different subpages of your website. An example of a breadcrumb path might be: Home > Shop > Product Page. 

In addition to helping people know where they are on your website, breadcrumbs also have benefits for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines can crawl breadcrumbs to better understand your website’s structure and categorize what you offer so that it ranks higher in search results. All of this means that more people are more likely to come across your page—and when they get to your website, they’ll be able to easily find what they need.

If you’d like some professional guidance crafting your web design and navigation, consider hiring a Squarespace Expert.

Learn how to set up your website homepage

This post was updated on January 23, 2023.