Contact belongs in the top-level navigation, not inside a dropdown. It is the most visited page on most small business sites.

The site

An accountancy practice with a clean site and a sensible seven-item menu.

The items are Home, Services, Industries, Resources, About, Careers, and a search icon.

Contact is inside the About dropdown, below Our Team and Our History.

On a phone it is two taps deep, after opening the menu and then expanding About.

The inference a visitor makes

The third works, since the footer has the details, which is why this survives. Everybody who eventually found it found it in the footer, and nobody reports the four seconds it took them.

Contact is the most visited page

Which is the fact that settles the argument.

On the overwhelming majority of small business sites, the contact page is either first or second by visits.

Putting the most visited page inside a dropdown under a different heading is an information architecture decision nobody would defend if stated plainly.

Check your own figures before arguing about this, since the answer is in your analytics and takes a minute.

A page that ranks second by visits and sits third-level in the navigation is misfiled.

That is the whole of the diagnosis.

How it ends up there

Since nobody chose this deliberately either.

The menu was designed to fit a certain width, and something had to move to make room.

Contact looked like a good candidate because the details are in the footer anyway.

About was the natural parent because that is where the human information lives.

Each step is reasonable and the outcome is that the thing people came for is hidden behind hovering.

The width constraint is real and there are better things to move.

A worked example

A practice moved Contact to the top level and dropped Careers into the footer, which kept the menu the same width.

Contact page visits rose by about forty per cent and form submissions rose with them.

Careers received almost no traffic before or after, which was the finding that made the trade obvious.

They had been giving prime navigation space to a page that received eleven visits a month.

The change took ten minutes.

Nothing else about the site was touched.

Dropdowns cost more than the space they save

Which is the general lesson underneath.

A dropdown requires hovering on a desktop and an extra tap on a phone, and on a phone it frequently opens over the thing somebody was reaching for.

Anything inside one receives substantially fewer visits than the same page at the top level.

So a dropdown is a decision to reduce traffic to everything inside it, in exchange for menu width.

That trade is worth making for genuinely secondary pages and never for the busiest one.

Where you have a dropdown, check what is inside it against your own visit figures.

The footer is a backstop, not the answer

Which is the argument usually offered.

Footer details work for the person who thinks to scroll, and they are a fallback rather than a route.

Somebody who has decided to make contact should not have to search for how.

Keep the footer details, and put the route in the navigation as well, since they serve different moments.

The footer catches the person reading to the end and the menu catches the person who arrived knowing what they wanted.

Count the clicks yourself

Which takes two minutes and produces the list.

Open your own site on a phone and count the taps to reach the contact page, the telephone number, the price information, and your main service page.

Anything above two taps is worth questioning.

Do it as a visitor rather than as somebody who knows where things are, which is the hard part.

Better still, ask somebody who has never seen the site to find your telephone number while you watch and say nothing.

Ten seconds of that is more persuasive than any argument about navigation.

The label matters as much as the position

Which is a smaller point in the same area and is worth fixing at the same time.

Get in Touch, Let's Talk, and Say Hello all mean contact and none of them is the word somebody scans for.

People looking for a way to reach you are looking for the word Contact, because that is the convention on every site they have ever used.

A cleverer label costs recognition for nothing in return, and the visitor's eye passes over it while scanning the menu.

The same applies to Services, About, and Prices, where the ordinary word is the one that gets found.

The header is the other half of the answer

Which sidesteps the navigation argument entirely.

A telephone number in the header, visible on every page without scrolling and tappable on a phone, means somebody who wants to make contact never needs the contact page at all.

That is a better outcome than fixing the menu, because it removes a step rather than shortening one.

Do both, since they serve different people: the header catches somebody ready to call, and the menu catches somebody who wants an address, a map, or a form.

A site with a tappable number in the header and Contact in the menu has answered this question in every way it arises.

The counter-case within the site

The rest is well done.

The services pages are specific, the team page has real photographs and named people, and the site loads quickly.

The footer does carry the address, the telephone number, and an email address, all correct.

And a business that genuinely wants fewer telephone calls, because it is at capacity, has a real reason to make contact less prominent.

That is a strategy rather than an accident, and it should be a decision somebody made deliberately rather than a consequence of menu width.

Almost nobody with contact buried in a dropdown has made that decision on purpose.

It is nearly always the residue of a layout constraint from years ago.

What to change

  1. Move Contact to the top level.
  2. Drop something else to the footer.
  3. Check your visit figures first.
  4. Count taps on a phone.
  5. Keep the footer details.
  6. Check what else is in dropdowns.
  7. Watch somebody try to find you.

Step three is what makes the change uncontroversial, since a page receiving eleven visits a month is occupying space belonging to one receiving several hundred.

The trades version is covered in a contractor site that buries the phone number.

Frequently asked questions

Why does this survive?

Because the footer has the details, so everybody who eventually found contact found it there, and nobody reports the four seconds it took them.

What settles the argument?

Your own figures. On most small business sites the contact page is first or second by visits, which makes putting it in a dropdown a filing error.

How does it happen?

The menu was designed to a certain width, something had to move, and contact looked like a candidate because the details are in the footer anyway.

What is wrong with dropdowns?

Anything inside one receives substantially fewer visits than the same page at the top level, so a dropdown trades traffic for menu width.

Is the footer enough?

No. It works for somebody who thinks to scroll and is a fallback rather than a route. Keep it and put the route in the navigation as well.

How do I check my own site?

Count the taps on a phone to reach contact, the telephone number, and prices. Better, watch somebody who has never seen it try to find your number.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Contact inside a dropdown?

Check where the contact page ranks in your visit figures. It is usually first or second.

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