Today, most online stores, news websites, and eCommerce sites would be incomplete without a mega menu. Even the biggest retail websites such as eBay or Amazon wouldn’t be successful without the help from their mega menu. What is the mega menu? When will a mega menu enhance your site? When shouldn’t you use a mega menu on your website? Keep reading to find the answers.
What is a mega menu?
A mega menu is a kind of navigation menu that makes all the options visible at once. It is laid out horizontally as well as vertically. Sometimes, it will be split into sections, sometimes not. One of the most famous websites that use a mega menu is the Amazon UK site. It comes with a mega menu that serves as a navigation menu and makes all the options visible at once. Besides, this menu is appended vertically and horizontally, both, sometimes split into sections if wanted. Some of the websites select to use the mega menu only for specific regions.
Why use a mega menu?
When you create a large website with multiple categories and subcategories, a mega menu can improve the user experience. More specifically, a mega menu is a drop-down menu with multi-level expansions. That allows you to pack your site’s entire navigation into a single menu. In addition, a mega menu lets visitors reach even the deepest sections of your website through the main menu. Moreover, the mega menu helps you generate more sales, increase conversions and keep your visitors browsing your website longer. Moreover, a mega menu can be beneficial for many types of websites.
- For an online store: An online store is a platform that offers many products under multiple categories and subcategories. And an ordinary navigational menu can’t offer the best user experience in such cases.
- For fashion and clothing stores: Fashion store websites are one of the most difficult platforms to build. The reason is that each item on a fashion or a clothing store usually come in many different sizes and choices for different genders and ages. For example, an online shoe store that offers a single product in many types of styles and brands should use a mega menu.
- A mega menu can offer a smoother and simpler way for the users to browse shoes in different brands, types, and sizes directly from the menu. We suggest that you should use Magento themes supporting the mega menu for your website. This is a great solution to enhance the user experience and increase sales.
- For hotels and restaurant websites: A mega menu can be a good choice for hotel and restaurant websites as well. Displaying the different types of rooms, leisure activities and meal plans will be much easier with the help of a mega menu.
- For blogs and magazine websites: The simple menu is more than enough for small and niche blogs. However, when it comes to magazine and news websites, a mega menu can offer a much better user experience.
When to use a mega menu?
Website Users are expecting one
If your website is a retail site then the users will have a habit to see the mega menus. And they use it to navigate the departments of the store. People are accustomed to using the mega menu in large stores department stores. For example, if you visit the website to look for a dress, you can go to the section of the site easily with one click.
A drop-down menu would be too large
In some cases, a drop-down menu contains so many options that it would detract from UX. The studies show that the mega menu enhanced UX compared to the drop-down menu. Because a drop-down menu with a lot of content will require the users to scroll down. Sometimes, the users have to scroll down and then back up again. This takes more time and can be confusing. Therefore, if your website needs to have a lot of elements in the navigation menu, a mega menu may be a good option to enhance UX. However, when you use one, you should do it in a way that’s intuitive for users. In addition, you can use design cues such as colors, text effects, and fonts to make it easy to browse.
Enhance the site’s design
Sometimes the mega menu might serve right to add more than just text links to your website. Many mega menus use it to link different texts and add more sub-categories and products to the essential products. It acts as links along with the text overlaying them. It improves the user experience to encourage visitor engagement and make the mega menu more functional. Also, it enhances the design and helps meet sales objectives.
When not using a mega menu
There will be times when you shouldn’t use a mega menu. Here are some cases.
When your website doesn’t have a lot of links
A mega menu will not be necessary if your website doesn’t have hundreds of pages. For the average small business site or blog, a mega menu will just make visitors confused and it will look pretty empty.
When your home page is nothing but links
If your homepage is just a page full of links to subpages then you don’t need a mega menu for your site as well. For example, the mega menu is less common in public sector websites than they are in retail.
When you want to create the funnel of users to specific pages
In some cases, your website will be designed to sell just one or two products or to encourage signups to get a mailing list. Therefore, you may have a banner on the homepage then directs visitors to a landing page.
In cases like these, you want to keep navigation minimal. However, a mega menu will give visitors so many options that they will be far less likely to visit the page you want them to. You should keep your navigation to a minimum and focus on funneling visitors into your landing page
On mobile
It is difficult to create a mega menu that will be legible on a small screen. To help it work, you have to make links tiny. It means that people wouldn’t be able to tap them or introduce scrolling. Combining a mega menu with scrolling can be confusing. Because it is difficult to know where the mega menu ends and the page content begins.
Tips for using a mega menu
Here are some of our useful tips and considerations for adding a mega menu to your online store.
Make it convenient for visitors to Scan
Make your mega menu easy and convenient for shoppers to scan and find the category they need by effectively using headings. Also, you need to consider the bold text and the typography utilized too.
Don’t Overload the visitors
Just because you can fit loads of categories and links in a mega menu doesn’t mean you should. Providing your visitors with too many choices can overload them and make it more difficult to find out what they’re seeking, so spend time carefully considering what to add to your menu.
Prioritizing the Navigate Menu
Consider the order of your navigation menu’s options. Analyze any data you have on visitors’ behavior and prioritize the options which your potential customers will want to see.
Avoid Using Links Too Close Together
It is important that each link has a large clickable area, therefore, when you place them too closely together, your visitor will find it harder to click on, particularly on mobile, which can lead to a bad UX.
Hover or Click?
Another factor to consider is how your website’s navigation menu is triggered; do visitors need to hover over an area or do they need to click? This needs careful consideration because you need to make sure visitors avoid unintentionally opening and closing menus.
Conclusion
With the assistance of the Mega menu, it will help you enhance the navigability of your site. Therefore, when customers visit your web they easily find the product they wish to buy by a quick view on your mega menu. This means it will improve the satisfaction of customers, they will buy more and want to come back to your site and the revenue also increase. It sounds good, right? Then depending on your web, you can implement a mega menu. If you don’t know how to start, contact Magesolution today to enjoy our eCommerce testing and enhancement service and leverage your store.
Heading tags: way to optimize its structure for the eCommerce site
