Customers’ first impression of a web store affects directly purchase decision-making, so providing great user experience is one of the top goals for ecommerce website owners to remain competitive in the modern business landscape. Navigation is a critical aspect that should be carefully considered in order to ensure seamless and pleasant UX to end-users. When poorly designed, navigation can do irreparable harm to your revenue-growth strategy. It makes it painful for visitors to interact with a website and leaves them no choice but to hit the ‘close’ button.
According to Statista, up to 16{881ed96bc2b3f74deefab0bdd1d9de50ba52fa862f6c49cd106b87e5ad6f8e27} of shopping carts get abandoned due to bad website navigation. Thus, intuitive and streamlined navigation is not an option anymore. It’s a must for forward-thinking businesses willing to reach their lead generation, conversion and sales goals.
Approaches and techniques to improve website navigation are innumerable. In this post, we share some best practices that will help you optimize your Magento navigation and so provide enhanced user experience to your viewers.
- Make the search tool intuitive and easy-to-use
When it comes to online shopping, every customer expects to find a particular product at no effort. That is the reason why your search box should be easy to locate and convenient to use. We suggest placing the search functionality on the website’s top, i.e. the header, and distinguishing it clearly, so that users could detect it easily. The search engine should also be comprehensive and robust, provide necessary search options and, of course, show relevant results to viewers. The ultimate goal here is to ensure that shoppers could find the information and goods they look for within seconds.
Magento Layered Navigation is an all-in-one solution designed to solve these tasks. This extension allows implementing an advanced search tool for Magento-driven ecommerce stores. By applying the module, you can set different product categories and attributes in the search box for customers to choose from. Moreover, the solution provides an ability to substitute conventional text with product images to provide viewers with a more compelling and eye-catching visual experience.
- Optimize the menu bar
To keep viewers engaged, you need to take care of proper organization of categories in the menu bar. Overstuffed, bulky, multi-tab menus confuse and distract customers, impeding them from making a purchase. Besides, complex menus scale poorly in responsive layouts, which is a disaster in the modern world full of devices with multiple screen resolutions. So, you should limit menu options and include links to the most important pages only. To identify the pages that are visited most, you can make use of click maps and heat maps, displaying where your viewers click. Popular analytics tools like Page Analytics by Google or Clicky will give you a hand in that. The menu items’ order is critical too – more important links should be placed on the left, since the majority of users tend to read from left to right.
Do the research to determine your most popular categories and don’t regret eliminating some of the menu choices. You can always add a secondary menu in the footer for less important links, if need be. Every ecommerce owner wants visitors to convert, and providing them with a concise and easy-to-use menu will come in useful to achieve this objective.
- Use simple and straightforward navigation titles
Website viewers should have a clear understanding of what they can find on the page they are about to open. A sophisticated language of the navigation titles can be misleading and frustrate your visitors. Use simple navigation titles that reflect the content of corresponding pages in the best way. Apart from that, keeping the titles themed rather than format-based is a proven approach to foster customer engagement with your site. Generic link names, say, ‘Catalogue’ or ‘Videos’ don’t say a lot about the information provided on a page. On the other hand, more descriptive titles like ‘New collection’ and “Video reviews’ help visitors to get an idea of what to expect from the provided content.
- Ensure all navigation elements are clickable
Surprisingly, but there’s a great deal of Magento owners leaving navigational bars on their websites with minimum links. When a navigation bar is divided into multiple categories, it’s important to make the labels located on the top bar clickable. This is a super simple way to achieve easy and seamless navigation on the site and increase its usability. Set all heading elements as clickable links that can take your customers to the necessary page. Top labels can be linked with category (or sub-category) product pages, customer testimonials, additional information, contacts, etc. Such a technique will make your website navigation more effective, ultimately increasing traffic and conversion rates.
- Keep the navigation consistent
At first it may seem non-significant, but navigation’s consistency actually has a great impact on the overall user experience. Seamless and consistent navigation promotes ease of use and increases your customers’ chances of quickly finding the information and products they need. If the navigation differs from page to page and lacks cohesiveness, it would become difficult for customers to take their bearings on the site, which harms the quality of their experience. Thus, make sure you stick to a well-thought-out website architecture and keep your navigation elements consistent on every page, so that users can move between them easily.
Final words
Smart and intuitive navigation makes a foundation for a successful Magento website that boasts highly satisfied customers and ever-increasing sales. We hope that using advanced Magento 2 extensions by Aitoc and putting our tips into practice will help you engage your visitors more efficiently via outstanding user experience.