Most (and Least) Popular Agency Website Navigation Items

The navigation on my website is something I haven't given a ton of thought.

Not to say it's not been considered and tweaked, but after the initial setup, not much has changed.

But it's arguably one of the most essential parts of your website. Whether or not someone finds what they need when they visit your website largely rests on how well your navigation performs.

And it got me thinking… What do most agencies use in their navigation?

Well… There was only one way to find out; Make an Airtable base and go through over 100 agency websites tracking every item in their top-level navigation.

And that's precisely what I did (using The Admin Bar Job Board listings as my dataset).

Results By Popularity

Here's a look at the most popular navigation items (in order). I tried to keep them exactly as presented, but I did combine things like “About”, “About Us” and “About Me” since they are nearly the same.

However, if someone used “Our Work” and “Our Projects” I left a distinction since those could have a slightly different meanings.

I'll include a few of my thoughts after the chart.

A few thoughts

As I spent a little over an hour staring at over 100 navigations, I noticed a few things.

The Big 5.

It's pretty interesting that after “Contact”, “About”, “Services”, “Home”, and “Blog”, the drop-off is pretty significant.

Clear > Clever.

As someone visiting your website for the first time, I'm thinking in my “own language” and when sites use cutesy names it can make it hard to find what you are looking for.

Pricing, anyone?

What's the number one thing prospects are curious about before they hire you? Pricing! Yet, very few (only 7) of the sites I reviewed made mention of their pricing in the menu. I know that giving a menu of prices isn't always doable, but perhaps we should be doing more to explain how our pricing works.

Hamburger Menus

Listen… I stare at websites for a living and “get” how websites work… but even I had to do a double take when the desktop navigation was hidden behind a hamburger menu. It can look nice, but I think it makes it a lot harder to move around your website.

Calls to Action

Most websites had some kind of button or stylistic choice that made one navigation item stand out above the rest (usually “contact”) — but not all of them. In the monotony of going through these sites, it was pretty amazing how much that always caught my attention first.

Okay, so what?

Perhaps you're looking at this article thinking “okay, so what?”. And perhaps nothing in this little research project changes your mind — but doing this did make me look at my own navigation with a little more scrutiny.

My blog, for example, is listed as “Learn”. Perhaps that's not a very obvious word choice for my articles. And my primary CTA in my navigation is “Get Started”, which might be too strong of a call to action for someone just discovering me. They probably don't want to get started right away.

If nothing else, perhaps this inspires you to review your navigation and find ways it could be improved. Try and put yourself in your visitor's shoes and look at it objectively.