Mastering Website Navigation: The Ultimate Guide

Great navigation is a crucial element to get right on your website for two main reasons.

First, it affects your user experience—helping users find what they want will result in more conversions.

Second, it helps search engines. Because good navigation will help them better understand how you’ve organized your site and ensure PageRank flows to the most beneficial pages.

But how can you improve navigation to help users find what they’re looking for and benefit yourSEO?

This article will explain precisely that.

Website navigation is the process of a user interacting with a website by selecting links, buttons, and other elements to discover the content on asite.

While website navigation describes users clicking on links, there are standard components that facilitate that navigation. Some of these include:

• Breadcrumbs
• Sidebars
• Mega menus
• Dropdowns
• Tabs
• Accordions

I’ll explain each one and how you can use them later on in theguide.

Before we dive into the navigation components and how they can help users navigate websites, it’s important to understand how users actually navigate sites.

There are three main ways, starting with forward navigation.

Forward navigation

This type of navigation helps users explore deeper within a site hierarchy, often to find more specific content within the same topicarea.

Here’s an example of typical forward navigation using Stripe’s documentation area.

First, a user may start on...