Website navigation problems on local business sites

A site can look tidy, load quickly and still lose enquiries because nobody can work out where to go next. Website navigation problems are easy to miss when you are the one who built the site, and just as easy to miss for the owner, who knows exactly where everything lives. A stranger on a phone, standing in a kitchen with a leaking tap, does not. This post covers the navigation faults that turn up most often on small local business sites, how to spot them in a few minutes, and how to mention them without sounding like you are marking homework.

What visitors are actually trying to do

Most people arriving at a local business site want one of a few things: confirm the business does what they need, check it covers their area, see roughly what it costs or what the work looks like, and find a way to get in touch. Navigation exists to get them to those answers with as little thinking as possible.

A useful test is to pick one of those goals and try to complete it as a first-time visitor. If you need more than two or three taps to reach the contact details of a plumber in Reading, the menu is doing its job badly, however good it looks.

The faults worth looking for

• Too many menu items. Ten or twelve top-level links, often because every service has its own entry. Visitors scan, they do not read. Grouping services under one heading is usually kinder.
• Vague labels. “Solutions”, “Offerings” or “Resources” tell a visitor nothing. “Services”, “Gallery” and “Contact” do.
• Contact buried in the footer. If the only route to a phone number is scrolling to the bottom of a long page, many visitors will not bother. We look at this in more detail in website contact page mistakes.
• A mobile menu that hides everything. The hamburger icon is fine, but it is sometimes tiny, low contrast or slow to open. On a phone it is the whole navigation, so it deserves a proper test.
• Dropdowns that fight the user. Menus that vanish if the pointer drifts a few pixels, or that need a tap to open and a second tap to follow the link. They are fiddly on a desktop and worse on a touchscreen.
• Dead ends. A service page with no next step, no link back and no contact prompt. The visitor reads it, nods and leaves. This overlaps with the issues in the website that never tells a visitor what to do next.
• Pages the menu forgot. A useful page, such as areas covered or prices, that exists but is not linked from anywhere obvious.
• Logo does not go home. A small thing, but many people expect the logo to take them back to the homepage, and nothing happens when they tap it.

A five-minute check you can do yourself

1. Open the site on your phone, not just a laptop. Navigation faults show up there first.
2. Without looking at the menu in advance, try to find a phone number or enquiry form. Note how many taps it took.
3. Try to find the service you would most likely be hired for, and the area the business covers.
4. Open two or three inner pages directly and look for a clear way onward: a button, a link, a contact prompt.
5. Count the top-level menu items and read each label as if you had never heard of the business.

Write down what you tried and what happened. “It took four taps to reach a phone number on my phone” is something you observed. “Your navigation is confusing” is an opinion, and an easy one to push back on.

What a fix usually looks like

Most of this is small work. Trim the menu to five or six clear labels. Put the phone number or a contact button in the header so it is visible on every page. Make sure each inner page ends with a next step. Add the missing page to the menu. None of this needs a redesign, which makes it a reasonable first project with a business that is wary of a big spend, and a sensible companion to a mobile check like the one in what “not mobile friendly” actually costs a local business.

Raising it without causing offence

Owners often chose the menu themselves, or approved it years ago. Lead with what a customer would experience, in a sentence or two, and offer a specific change. For example: “On my phone I had to scroll a fair way to find your number. Putting a call button at the top of every page would be a quick fix and I would be happy to sketch it.” That is polite, concrete and easy to say yes to.

Where Patchscout fits

When you find a business through Patchscout, the audit it runs covers speed, SEO, mobile, SSL and the site builder, and our system uses those real findings to draft your outreach email. Navigation is a judgement call, so it is not something Patchscout scores; it is a quick manual look you add once a prospect looks promising.

Whichever way you find them, spend a few minutes using the site the way a customer would. What you notice first-hand is usually the most persuasive thing you can put in an email.