Optimizing Your WordPress Navigation for Increased Sales
In today’s fast-paced world, people have short attention spans. If your website’s navigation is cluttered or confusing, visitors will leave and shop elsewhere. To ensure that your WordPress navigation is helping you increase sales rather than bounce rate, you need to optimize it. This article will provide you with five tips to optimize your site navigation and boost sales.
1. Create a Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is a design principle that emphasizes ranking design elements to influence how website visitors interact with them. It involves using principles like size, color, contrast, proximity, white space, and more to make certain aspects of your website stand out. By implementing an effective visual hierarchy, users can navigate your website quicker, reducing the amount of effort required to engage with your website, content, and products.
When creating your website’s visual hierarchy, consider using bright colors to distinguish important elements of the page, negative space around important text or page elements to make it more easily visible to the reader, and predictable patterns like an F-pattern or Z-pattern to highlight important information. Also, choose a WordPress theme that offers a good design to begin with or that offers easy page building and customization options so your visual hierarchy can be optimized.
2. Implement Faceted Search
Faceted search refers to a search and navigation feature that allows users to search by selecting from a range of attributes to narrow down results. It’s a method of filtering search results to enhance the user experience by helping them find exactly what they’re looking for. Faceted search can improve the user experience by allowing users to quickly see what products and content are available, applying the correct facets enables users to find exactly what they’re looking for immediately, and it allows you to manage an extensive content catalog while enabling users to easily navigate your site and content to find what they’re looking for.
Faceted search can be implemented through JavaScript tweaks, canonical tags, and robots.txt. There are also several plugins that can be used to add facets to internal search in WordPress site navigation and WooCommerce sites. One great option is FacetWP, which allows for an advanced, faceted search (and is compatible with WooCommerce, ACF, Beaver Builder and other popular plugins).
3. Maximize Your Website Footer
Your website footer should play a key role in your WordPress site navigation strategy. The footer is displayed on every product page or piece of content on your site. Users often use it as a quick navigation tool, so it needs to feature relevant information. Maximize your website footer by including links to relevant pages, as well as the pages that users expect to find in a footer which may include your contact information and about page, FAQ section, privacy policy and T&Cs, shipping information and returns policies (for eCommerce sites), a search bar, and homepage link.
Most good themes will already have a widget ready footer area or the option for a footer menu. But if your theme doesn’t, you can build your own with the help of a plugin. For example, you can use the Header & Footer addon along with the core Elementor page builder to design your own custom footers from scratch.
4. Use Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a way to showcase your navigation system and enable users to easily find their location on a website. If you run a large eCommerce store with lots of products and pages, breadcrumbs will prevent your customers from getting lost while browsing your website. A breadcrumb menu looks something like this: Home / Category / Product Page. It’s typically located under your primary navigation menu, right above your site content, so visitors can easily see and visit these pages without having to scroll through your website.
Breadcrumbs save visitors from having to click back through the site, use the main menu, or search for a specific page. Using breadcrumbs to help visitors navigate your site provides a better user experience which will, ultimately, lead to more sales. Another reason you should consider using breadcrumbs is that Google loves them. They help to outline your website’s structure and boost SEO, which makes it easier for search engines like Google to find and display them in results pages.
You can easily add breadcrumbs to WordPress by enabling them in your theme settings, using a plugin (like Yoast SEO), or adding them manually with Custom Code (which we do not recommend unless you are very comfortable coding, as this requires editing your functions.php, as well as all the template files where you’d like your breadcrumbs to appear).
5. Use a Search That Stands Out
The default WordPress search does the job, but it’s quite limiting. Fortunately, there are several WordPress search plugins that can enhance the search experience, helping users to find what they’re looking for more efficiently. A powerful search system can hugely improve your WordPress site navigation. The default WordPress search bar only indexes keywords from page titles or content, which can limit results. Several purpose-built WordPress search plugins provide powerful search options for online stores or knowledge base websites.
For an online store, the search option should be capable of scanning product pages to offer customers more refined results. This can speed up the checkout process as customers can immediately find what they’re looking for by typing it into the search field. For an online magazine or blog, you might consider a search feature that enables autocomplete to offer instant search suggestions, allowing users to find solutions before they finish typing. In this case FiboSearch is a great option.
Another important consideration when implementing a standout search option is the placement. You want the search bar to be placed in a location that the user would expect to find a search bar. Typically, you’ll find the search bar in the top-right or top-center of the page, as is the case with sites like Amazon or YouTube. Placing the search bar in one of these locations ensures it’s immediately visible and accessible to the user when they land on your page.
Conclusion
When your website’s navigation is optimized and everything runs smoothly, customers will be more inclined to complete their journey and convert. The WordPress website tips outlined in this article, combined with regular WordPress site backups and updates, will help streamline your site navigation for a seamless user experience. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and design your site navigation with the user experience in mind.
