How To Choose What Goes In Your Squarespace Website’s Header Navigation

Your site route is a path that someone will take to fulfill the primary or secondary goal of your website. 

Most people don’t go from the homepage to check out right away. You need to make sure they have a simple and clear way to get the information they need in order to take action. 

What things will visitors of your site need to know in order to fulfill your primary goal?

If I am a tattoo artist, then people will probably want to see my work, look at my prices, and learn a little about me before they decide to book an appointment.

The site routes for this might look something like this:

Home > My Work > Services > About > Book Now

Some site routes might be shorter.

A restaurants route could be:

Home > Menu > Reviews > Order

Or an e-commerce website might be even shorter:

Home > Shop

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the types of pages you would want to see before you bought your product or service.

Write down all the possible combinations of your site route for a user to complete your primary goal. 

What are the essential pages needed for people to learn enough to buy or work with you? These need to be included in the top main menu header navigation.

Essential Rules for Header Navigation on a Squarespace Website:

• Choose no more than five pages for your top navigation. (The homepage doesn’t count here.)

• Any other pages that are important but don’t contribute to your primary goal can go in the footer navigation. 

• Blogs or content pages are a great way for people to learn more about your business.

• The fewer items you have, the easier it will be for the user to navigate

Remember, navigation links can also have drop-downs, but you definitely don’t want to overdo it here. 

A note about navigation menus for e-commerce stores:

Your top navigation will probably be the categories of your stuff. 

For example, a clothing company might have the top navigation as Men, Women, and About, with a drop-down submenu for categories, such as shirts, pants, etc. 

You are still going to need to map this out, but again, it’s good to have this done ahead of time, and I’ll show you how to create menus and submenus in a later course.

Make sure you write down your navigation menu items. 

If you want some help planning your Squarespace don’t hesitate to schedule a free web design call with me.

Written by Clint Mally