Website Navigation Trends: What Design Practices You Should Follow in 2018?

Abandoned E-commerce websites are like abandoned houses. It is interesting to know that they exist. But, people rarely visit them. And just like it is confusing to navigate around abandoned houses with ease, complex websites often leave visitors baffled! When people want to come up with an ecommerce website, they approach an ecommerce web design company, discuss their requirements, and launch their e-store with great enthusiasm. But as years pass, it suffers from lesser orders and rarely any views. What do you think might be the reason behind it?

Well, the biggest reason behind the above scenario is – complex navigation. And the other reason – lack of knowledge about latest navigation trends. You might have known and heard about several factors that contribute to the UX of a website. But out of all of these, website navigation stands of utmost importance.

It is time to fasten your seatbelts, as we navigate you through some of the practices that best ecommerce website development companies follow for giving better results. But before we do that, we will understand why navigation is important.

Importance of Navigation

A well-planned navigation of your ecommerce website is one of the major factors that contribute to the search engine rankings of a website. If the website is well-planned, it is sure to boost the number of clicks, duration spent on the website as well as the page views. Whether it is ecommerce shopping cart development or product page design, the structure of the website should be such that people can take better buying decisions. When customers take better decisions, it will boost your sales.

Now that you have understood the importance of navigation, let us understand what trends your website needs to follow in the year 2018:

Mull Over the Menus

If you have had the experience of surfing ecommerce website, you must have seen different kinds of menus including drop down menu, static menu, interactive menu etc. However, sometimes the type of menu does not go with the website design. There is a solution to this problem. if you have a lesser menu items, you can have bigger images and text. And if you have a very long list of products, you can categorize and use small menu items.

Speak with the developers offering ecommerce website development and select a menu that is perfectly compatible with your website. Consider attributes like design, font, color combination etc.

Consider Mobile Responsiveness

Surfing on mobiles has become as obvious as breathing. It should not come as a surprise if in some years, desktop surfing becomes a myth. If you want your website to rank high on Google search engines, you must go by the mobile-first approach. The design of your website should perfectly fit to the mobile screen and enable the users to surf through your website easily. Whether or not to keep the mobile version like the desktop version is your call.

Professional ecommerce website developers should consider factors like interaction capability of different devices, visual interface as well as the website speed.

Get Rid of Broken Links

If your website has links that do not work, your business will not work for sure! This is because when users click on non-working links, it takes them nowhere and creates confusion. An experience like this one acts as a huge turn off and will ensure that the visitor never comes back. To get over such a problem, you must ensure that there are links that redirect the visitors to different sections and pages of the websites. When you approach a company that is revamping your old website, ask the professionals to mend the broken links or get rid of them.

Be Consistent with Navigation

Last, but not the least, the biggest problem with certain websites is that some of the pages offer great navigational experience whereas some are quite overwhelming for the users. This happens because the links belonging to the same category are not categorized rightly. If this is taken care of by the designers and developers, it will help the customers to find different products easily. Also, all the content related to each product should be present on the same page.

Before you sit to discuss the structure of your website with ecommerce website development company, think about the groups and categories you want your website to have and create a hierarchy.

Concluding…

If you follow the above-mentioned tips, you are sure to have a navigational system that offers a better user experience. There are many other steps that you can take to ensure this but it is difficult to list them all here. Meanwhile, keep yourself acquainted with other navigation trends and do share with us!