This is part 1 of a 2-part series on how to optimize your main menu. In the first part, I will tell you exactly what to put in your main menu to optimize sales and conversions.

It's straightforward, logical, and easy to do, yet 18% of all online stores fail to do this. Do you want to be a part of that statistic?

In the second part, I'll cover how to use data to order your main menu.

Q: How do I optimize my main menu for sales and conversions? - Part 1

What to put in my main menu

When visiting your online store, a potential customer's first order of business is to decide whether your store is relevant. This isn't necessarily a conscious effort. But it's something we all do when landing on a new site, an article we clicked on, or even when we're walking into a physical store.

The problem is we're all wired to be lazy. Your potential customer isn't just leaving if she finds you irrelevant. She's also leaving if the process of deciding isn't easy. Therefore, your job is not only to be as relevant as possible for your target audience. It's also to make it as easy as possible to determine whether you're relevant.

When a visitor determines the relevance of your online store, user research tells us that they rely heavily on top-level menu items. Looking at your top-level menu items - your main menu - is a fast way to estimate what you sell and whether you're relevant. The menu is even more important on mobile as you have less screen estate to help visitors determine your relevance.

Furthermore, user research also tells us that visitors rely heavily on sub-categories within a top-level category to drill down further whether your products are relevant.

Consequently, there are two rules to remember when designing main menus for an online store:

• Show your product categories in your main, top-level menu.

• Don't ever nest your product categories in a "Shop" or "Products" dropdown.

If you nest your product categories in a "Shop" dropdown, you're making it unnecessarily difficult for visitors to determine what you sell and hence your relevance. And by bringing your product categories in the top-level menu, you also prevent nested dropdowns that require a visitor to perform a double-hover interaction (hover on the Shop menu, hover on the Apparel category, and then click on T-shirts). The double-hover interaction sucks because it introduces two problems:

1. Users accidentally hover on the wrong item and open the wrong menu

2. Users accidentally exit the menu by not staying inside the hover area

Do:

Don't:

Help: If you found this article interesting or get any value out of it, I would really appreciate you retweeting my Twitter thread about this here or by clicking the tweet below. It motivates me to keep doing this and is the only way to get my content "out there".

Godspeed,

Mathias