Menus With Too Many Things In Them

How menus grow

Nobody designs a fourteen-item menu. It accumulates.

A page is added and needs to be reachable, so it goes in the menu. Then another. Then a campaign page that never came down.

Each addition is individually reasonable and nobody ever removes anything, because removal requires a decision that adding did not.

The result is a menu that reflects the history of the site rather than the priorities of the business.

What a menu is actually for

Not listing everything. Getting somebody to the thing they want quickly.

Which means it is a set of decisions about what most visitors need, and everything else is a distraction from that.

A visitor scanning fourteen items reads perhaps four of them before choosing, and the choice is frequently wrong.

Five to seven items is the range where somebody can take in the whole set at a glance, which is the point at which a menu starts working.

Naming them

• Use the words customers use, not internal terminology.
• Say what the page is, not something clever.
• Keep them short, one or two words where possible.
• Avoid overlapping names that could each be the right answer.
• Put contact last, where people look for it.

The second is where personality creeps in and costs clarity. Our Work is clearer than Portfolio, which is clearer than Showcase, which is clearer than anything invented.

A worked example

A business with thirteen menu items, including three that led to pages built for campaigns that had ended.

Checking the analytics, four items accounted for the overwhelming majority of clicks, and five had not been clicked in six months.

They cut it to six: the three main services, our work, about, and contact.

Everything else moved into the footer or into the relevant service page.

Nothing was deleted, and nothing became unreachable.

Navigation to the service pages rose noticeably, because the items that mattered were now visible rather than being the fifth and ninth of thirteen.

Dropdowns

The usual response to a menu that has grown, and it defers the problem rather than solving it.

A dropdown hides items behind a hover or a tap, which means they are not visible when somebody scans the menu.

On a phone, hover does not exist, so the behaviour differs from what was designed and frequently produces a menu that opens when somebody meant to navigate.

They also add a keyboard and screen reader burden that a flat menu does not have.

Where a dropdown is genuinely needed, it should open on click rather than hover, be reachable by keyboard, and contain a manageable number of items rather than a second full menu.

The mobile menu

A different problem hidden behind the same icon.

A hamburger icon collapses the entire menu, which saves space and hides everything behind a tap.

Which is acceptable for a site with a well-ordered menu and poor for one with fourteen items, because opening it produces a wall of options.

Worth considering: keeping the one or two most important items visible outside the menu, particularly the phone number, so the most common action needs no tap at all.

And labelling the icon with the word Menu, which measurably improves how many people find it, particularly among older visitors.

The counter-case

Where a large menu is correct.

A shop with genuine categories, where browsing is how people find things and the menu is the primary interface.

A large site with genuinely distinct sections, where a mega menu is a considered structure rather than an accumulation.

And a site whose audience is repeat visitors who know what they are looking for, where breadth is faster than depth.

The distinction is whether the menu was designed or whether it grew, and most small business menus grew.

What goes in the footer instead

The place for everything that must exist and does not need prominence.

Privacy policy, terms, accessibility statement, and anything legal or administrative.

Secondary pages: a page about a service you rarely sell, an old case study, an area page.

Contact details repeated, which is where a proportion of people look for them regardless of what is in the menu.

And links to your listing or social profiles, which belong somewhere and not at the top.

A footer can carry twenty links without harm, because nobody is scanning it under time pressure.

Where people look when the menu fails

Worth knowing, because it changes what else needs to exist.

Somebody who cannot find what they want in a menu does one of three things: uses a search box if there is one, scrolls to the footer, or leaves.

Which makes a search box worth having on any site beyond a dozen pages, and worth omitting on a small one where it would return almost nothing.

It also makes the footer a genuine second navigation rather than a legal dumping ground, and worth organising into columns with headings.

And it means links within page content matter, since somebody reading a service page should be able to reach the related one without returning to the menu.

The current page

A small detail that helps orientation more than it appears to.

The menu should indicate which page somebody is on, through a different colour, a weight change, or an underline.

Without it, a visitor who has clicked through two or three pages loses track of where they are, particularly on a site where pages look similar.

Most themes handle this and some do it so subtly that it is invisible, which is worth checking against the same contrast standard as anything else.

Colour alone is not sufficient to mark it, for the same reason colour alone is never sufficient.

Deciding what stays

1. Look at which menu items get clicked.
2. List what a first-time visitor needs.
3. Keep five to seven, named plainly.
4. Move the rest to the footer or into a relevant page.
5. Delete anything genuinely dead.
6. Check nothing became unreachable.

The sixth is the check that prevents creating orphan pages, which is the one real risk in this exercise and takes a few minutes to verify.

Done properly this is an hour of work, and it is one of the very few changes that improves a site without adding a single thing to it.

The orphan question is covered in telling Google your pages exist.

Frequently asked questions

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.