Navigation labels people understand

Start with the words your visitors already use. You will find them in your site search logs, your support emails and the questions people ask on sales calls. If people search for “prices”, a label that says “Plans and packages” makes them translate before they click.

Labels like “Solutions”, “Explore” and “Resources” could sit on almost any website, which is why they tell a visitor nothing about yours. Someone looking for your rates has no reason to open “Solutions” before “Resources”. A plain label such as “Prices” or “Case studies” answers the question before the click.

Internal names fail in the same way. “Client Hub”, “Learning Centre” or the name of a product team mean something to the people who chose them. To a visitor they are a puzzle to solve before they can move on.

Keep the top level short. Every extra item makes the others slower to scan, and five or six is enough for most small sites. Make the labels parallel too: all nouns, or all short phrases of the same kind. “Work, Services, Prices, About, Contact” reads as one set. “Our work, What we do, Pricing info, Blog, Get in touch” reads as five different voices.

Put the word that carries the meaning first. People scan the start of each label and skip the rest, so “Prices for teams” works better than “For teams: our prices”.

A good menu tells people two things: where they can go, and where they are now. The second matters most to people who arrive from a search result or a shared link, deep inside your site, without passing the home page.

Mark the current page in the navigation, and make the page title match the label that leads to it. If someone clicks “Prices”, the page they land on should say “Prices” at the top, not “Plans built for growth”. WCAG covers this in Success Criterion 2.4.8, Location, at level AAA: people should be able to tell where they are within a set of pages.

Use more than colour to mark the current item. A link that is only a different shade is easy to miss with colour blindness, on a washed-out screen or in bright sun. Success Criterion 1.4.1, Use of Color, asks that colour is never the only way information is shown. A heavier weight with an underline works on any screen. In the code, add aria-current="page" to the current link so screen readers announce it as well.

Hover shows what you can click, and after the click the marker and the page title move together.

Here is a studio website with a menu icon on a desktop screen and four brand words behind it, then the same header with its sections in view. The page content is the same in both. Only the navigation changed.

A menu icon saves space on a phone, where space is short. On a desktop screen there is usually room for five or six links, and hiding them costs more than it saves. Research by Nielsen Norman Group found that people use hidden navigation less, and find things less often, than navigation they can see. The effect was strongest on desktop.

Visible links do a second job as well. They tell a new visitor, at a glance, what the site offers. A closed menu hides that summary behind a click that many people never make.

On phones, a menu button is a fair trade. Put the word “Menu” next to the icon, keep the button in the same place on every page, and mark the current page inside the menu when it opens.

You can test navigation labels before a single page exists. Two methods cover most of what you need to know.

A tree test shows people your menu as a plain text list, with no design, and asks where they would look for something. It tells you whether the labels and groups make sense on their own. A first-click test shows a screen and asks people where they would click to start a task. It tells you whether the labels still work once they sit in a real layout, next to everything else competing for attention.

Write the tasks with care. If you ask “Where would you find our prices?”, people will click “Prices” because the words match. Ask instead “Where would you find out what a website review costs?”, and you learn whether the label works for someone who doesn’t know your vocabulary.