What Is Website Navigation?

Website navigation is how visitors move around a site, and it’s also the set of interface elements that makes that movement possible. Nielsen Norman Group’s definition (2014) calls a site’s navigation “a collection of user interface components” with one primary goal: helping users find information and functionality.

When navigation fails, visitors often leave rather than dig for the page they wanted. The damage shows up as a poor user experience, weaker engagement, and lost sales or signups. The failure is easy to spot on your own site: a page that appears in no menu, footer, or in-content link only gets visitors who already know it exists.

Types of website navigation

Most visitors expect a navigation menu at the top of every page, but the header menu is only one piece. Most sites combine several of these:

• Global navigation: the primary menu, usually in the header, repeated on every page and covering the site’s main sections.
• Local navigation: links within one section of the site, often listed in a sidebar.
• Contextual navigation: internal links placed inside the content, pointing to related pages.
• Breadcrumbs: a trail of links showing the path from the homepage to the current page.
• Footer navigation: the links at the bottom of every page, usually contact details, policies, and other secondary pages.
• On-site search: a search box for visitors who know what they want but not where it lives.

Navigation vs. a navigation menu

Navigation is the whole wayfinding system of a site: menus, breadcrumbs, in-content links, footer links, and search working together. A navigation menu is one component of that system, usually the linked list of pages in the site header. Every menu is navigation; not all navigation is a menu.

Why navigation matters for SEO

Search engines find pages much the way visitors do. Google uses links to find new pages to crawl and as a signal of how relevant those pages are, and the vast majority of pages in its results are discovered by crawling rather than submitted by hand. A page that no menu, breadcrumb, or in-content link points to (an orphan page) may never be crawled or indexed.

A sitemap helps by telling search engines which pages you think are important, but it makes crawling more efficient rather than replacing internal links. Put your key pages in the main navigation, make sure every page you want indexed has at least one crawlable internal link (a plain HTML anchor that crawlers can follow), and use analytics or user testing to find the pages visitors struggle to reach.

Five rules for good navigation

Good navigation is mostly restraint. Five rules cover most sites:

• Describe, don’t tease. Every label should tell visitors exactly what page it leads to. “Pricing” beats “What we offer.”
• Stay consistent. Keep the menu in the same place, with the same items, on every page, so nobody has to relearn it.
• Keep key pages prominent. Your most important pages belong in the main menu, linked straight from the homepage rather than buried where nobody looks.
• Make it work without a mouse. Wrap each major block of links in the HTML nav element so screen readers can recognize and skip it, mark the current page with aria-current and an open submenu with aria-expanded, and give icon-only buttons a text label. Quick check: put the mouse aside and Tab through the menu; you should reach every item and always see the focus outline.
• Grow deliberately. Once a site outgrows a single menu, say a store with hundreds of products, add breadcrumbs or on-site search instead of cramming the header.

When you’re ready to design the menu itself, our guide to website navigation menu best practices walks through 16 design tips.