Navigation and menus

Navigation is how visitors move around your site. It is usually a menu in the header and a set of links in the footer. Because both are shared across pages, they normally live in your layout. See the Layouts guide for where to find that.

Decide what goes in the menu

Keep the main menu short. Five to seven items is a reasonable ceiling. Every item you add makes the others harder to notice, and on a phone a long menu becomes a scrolling list.

A few things that consistently work:

• Name items after what the visitor wants, not after your internal structure. "Pricing" beats "Commercial Information".
• Put the thing most people came for early in the menu.
• Keep one clear action (Contact, Book, Get a Quote) visually distinct from the rest.
• Group related pages under a parent item rather than listing eight services across the top.

The footer can carry more: secondary pages, your privacy policy and terms, your address, social links. Nobody expects the footer to be short.

Link to internal pages properly

This is the one thing on this page that will save you real trouble later.

When a menu item points at one of your own pages, select that page from the list of pages rather than typing its address. A link created that way is bound to the page itself. If someone later changes the page's slug or moves it under a different parent, the link follows and keeps working.

A hand-typed address is just text. It does not know it points at your page. Rename the page and the menu item quietly starts leading to a not-found page. This is easy to miss, because you are unlikely to click your own navigation while testing the page you just renamed.

If you are auditing an existing site, checking that internal links are page references rather than typed addresses is a good use of an hour.

Add external links

External links point somewhere off your site, such as your Google Business profile, a booking system or a social account.

Paste the full address including https://. An address without it can be treated as a page on your own site and go nowhere.

External links usually open in a new tab, so the visitor does not lose your site. That is worth doing for booking systems and social profiles. Do not do it for links between your own pages; opening a new tab for those is disorienting and clutters the visitor's browser.

External links break without warning when the other site reorganizes. Check them a couple of times a year.

Check navigation before publishing

Menu changes reach the whole site at once, so give them a moment of attention.

• Click every item in the preview and confirm it lands where you expect.
• Switch to the mobile preview. Menus collapse at narrow widths, and one item too many can push the layout around.
• Make sure the page you are currently on is indicated in the menu if your design does that.
• After publishing, load your live site and click through once. Two minutes here catches most problems.

If you remove a page that is in your navigation, check the Page Usage information on that page first. It shows where the page is referenced, so you know what will be left pointing at nothing.