Yep, this is a clickbait post.
The Feast themes are not designed for a secondary navigation and we don’t recommend dual navigation.
Trying to use two navigation menus is a rookie mistake and goes against best practices across-the-web.
Note: this also applies to single navigation menus that simply have too many things in it.
Focus
when everything is important, nothing is important
This is true of all things in life, including your website. Enough has been written on this topic that we won’t rehash it, just leave you with some articles:
- https://medium.com/@MissionOslo/when-everything-is-important-nothing-is-important-d0a8f81eb3a2
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/common-website-navigation-mistakes/
- https://exponentially.co/the-ideal-navigation-menu/
- https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/website-navigation/
- https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/website-navigation/
Improve your site structure
One of the most common reasons people have too much in their menu, is that their website structure sucks.
Your website should have a logical structure and a flow to it, going from broad to specific. And you don’t want too many layers.
- https://neilpatel.com/blog/site-structure-enhance-seo/
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/site-structure-seo/292803/
- https://yoast.com/site-structure-the-ultimate-guide/
- https://moz.com/learn/seo/website-architecture-internal-links-video
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/website-structure-affects-seo/186553/
There’s always the search menu, when people can’t find what they’re looking for.
What to remove immediately
- “Home” link – your logo already links to your homepage, and people are pre-conditioned to know to click the menu to get to the home page
- “Contact” link – people know to find this in the footer
- “Category” links – unless you know 80%+ of your visitors come to your site looking for a specific topic/category (see “Who is your audience”), a category shouldn’t be in the menu
Who is your audience
Step 1 when we see sites with too much in the navigation menu, is to dive into their analytics and find out where the majority of their traffic is coming from, and what they’re looking for.
Take a look at your “top pages” report, and try to figure out what the top 10 pages have in common, and what navigation element would actually be helpful for them.
What’s important to your audience
While there’s room for pushing your own agenda and linking to things that support your business objectives, the primary goal is to serve content that’s most important to your audience.
If most of your traffic comes to your site looking for paleo recipes, linking to “Desserts” in your primary navigation menu probably isn’t the right thing to do.
You can drive even further into analytics by installing heatmapping or click tracking software on your site, and watching what they’re actually reading and clicking on. Some options are:
Navigation is a work in progress
Your audience will change over time, as will your business goals. You should periodically put aside time to re-evaluate your navigation menu and site structure to better align with both.
But I still want a secondary navigation menu
It’s your website and you’re free to do what you want with it.
But it’s not part of what the themes were designed for, and not something we offer support for. And we always advise asking: why am I making this change?
This kind of customization is the territory where you need to look into hiring a professional developer for custom website builds.
