As your business has grown and evolved over the years, you likely have made many additions to your website. With these additions, your website category structure can quickly become unwieldy. We suggest that you take time to streamline your top-level categories and organize them for maximum effectiveness.

It’s good practice to occasionally take a step back and think carefully about how you can simplify your site organization, particular your top-level categories in your menu bar.

Each website is unique, but here are some general tips you can keep in mind as you review your top-level navigation:

• Keep your headings brief and minimize the number of top-level headings as much as possible.
• Move non-essential categories into the footer navigation or dropdown menus.
• If needed, rethink your criteria for categorization. Here are some examples of various criteria you might use: product type, product function, customer type, activity type, or user action (for example, “Learn,” “Connect with Us,” “Find Us”).
• Use category headings that make it clear to the user what they are in for by clicking. We do not recommend cutesy and subtle headings that won’t make sense to most users.

To help customers get the best use out of your website, make sure that your top level categories are streamlined, and reflect what is most important to your business, and your customers.

If you are a MightyMerchant customer, you can read more about setting your navigation in our documentation on Editing Navigation in MightyMerchant.

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