A Guide to Website Navigation and Architecture: Best Practices for Improving User Experience.

 A Guide to Website Navigation and Architecture: Best Practices for Improving User Experience..

Ease of use is a broad term. Every pixel of a website impacts the user experience: colors, sizes, fonts, loading speed, animations and navigation.

While creating a great user experience isn't easy or quick, it's worth it—it's a win for you and your users. In this article, we’ll focus on the latter factor – navigation – and how an intuitive website structure can improve it.

Why usability is important

The purpose of Google's search engine is to provide users with good, relevant content that matches their search intent. To do this, Google measures what users like and don't like in order to improve search results. If a user visits your site and returns to the search results to select another page, they didn't find the answer on your site - a clear sign that your site lacks quality. Accordingly, it will not rank high.

The most obvious and common reason for this problem is irrelevant content – ​​users cannot find what they need. However, modern search algorithms are able to assess the quality of content quite precisely. So if you rank in the top 10, content may not be the problem. In fact, the highest quality content has little meaning if it is not presented in a pleasing format. So, great UX is a must to achieve high positions in the SERPs.

 In other words: every second user surfs the Internet via a smartphone. This is a very different experience than using a desktop: no mouse, no keyboard, small screen. Websites should adapt to these conditions in order to offer a high level of usability to all users.

Website navigation best practices

The term “intuitive” was mentioned in connection with the topic of navigation – but what exactly does that mean? Intuitive navigation means that its elements are in places that are familiar to users. The following methods have proven successful for user-friendly navigation:

Use standard navigation elements. The navigation elements are the same on almost every modern website. It's important to use familiar elements so as not to unnecessarily confuse users. These elements are: a horizontal navigation bar, a hamburger menu, and the footer menu.

Arrange the pages correctly. Users scroll pages from left to right and top to bottom: You should use the same pattern when arranging pages in the menu.

Name your navigation elements briefly and clearly. Simple rule: don't write unnecessary words.

Use breadcrumbs. For pages that are more than 2 levels away from the home page, breadcrumbs are a must. Breadcrumbs not only visualize where you are, but are also a very practical tool for jumping up the page hierarchy.

How do you structure a website?

These depend heavily on your current status quo.

Create a structure from the semantic core

People searching for your products or services online use different search terms. A semantic core refers to those keywords that allow users to find you. The semantic core is also the basis for the content of your website. From this you can derive the main and subcategories of your website.

Analytics based structure

If your website is already up and running, it may make more sense to use pages and metrics from Google Analytics or Google Search Console. The best tactic is to prioritize pages. The best priority metric is pageview regardless of traffic source to include all sessions from organic search, direct traffic, and redirects.

Consider this: The main category page may not receive any page views. Instead, the sub-levels may generate a lot of traffic, requiring you to include the parent page in the navigation. A simple way to implement this is to create a category-based pivot table with the child pages' metrics.

Make sure important pages are accessible

We have already talked about the arrangement and categorization of pages. Now we're talking about other important elements of any website. In addition to parent and child pages, there are always popular, uncategorized pages (e.g. the login page).

By using page views as your main priority metric, you ensure that these pages are not overlooked. To automatically check whether all important pages are included in the navigation, use SE Ranking's SEO audit.

The depth indicates how many clicks a user needs to access the page. The homepage has a depth of 1. Pages that the homepage links to have a depth of 2, and so on. Make sure all important pages have a depth of 2, i.e. h. that users can access it from the home page.

Inlinks refer to the number of internal pages that point to the target page. The homepage should have the largest number of these links. Make sure that other important pages also have a large number of internal links. For example, if the login page only has 5 inlinks, it can be accessed from these 5 pages - in this case, this would be quite a challenge for users logging in.

Export the results to merge with Google Analytics metrics or a similar tool to determine page priority.

Analyze your competitors

Another way to create a website structure is to analyze your main competitors. If you recognize consistent patterns, you should implement them yourself. For example, the top 3 bike shops have a mega menu for the Bikes drop-down category, as well as bike-related pages/categories in the horizontal navigation menu.

So if you want to create navigation for a bike shop, it should look something like this.

Regardless of which method suits you best, it makes most sense to combine all of these approaches together.

More ways to improve UX

As mentioned, navigation is one component of a user-friendly website - but there are other optimizations you can make: