Why Website Dropdown Menus Should Be Limited

When designing and building an engaging and effective website for your business, your main goal should be to attract, engage and capture as many site visitors as possible to examine, learn about and purchase your business products and services for use toward more convenience and betterment in their own endeavors. You want to present your brand and all that you offer to customers in as direct, clear and interesting a way as possible.

Your aim is to assist your site visitors in grasping and appreciating your primary company objectives, goals and offerings without the need to spend unnecessary time attempting to understand complex product descriptions or site navigation instructions. Especially since today’s global reach of e-commerce is constantly widening and gaining speed in its active operations, all aspects of a successful business website should display site features and functions with high degrees of simplicity and precision for best levels of visitor engagement and results.

Reasons Why Website Dropdown Menus Should Be Limited

There are multiple reasons why dropdown menus on websites should be limited in number and detail, including the following:

• Unwieldy Dropdown Navigation.
– A web page dropdown menu that is too lengthy, wordy or detailed in topic listings can be difficult to navigate successfully. While attempting to scroll down long, complex topic listings, site visitors often click into the wrong pages or subject areas of your site. This wastes their time and can be annoying to busy consumers who, without this annoyance, might become new customers on their first visit to your company site. Especially when your site users must travel through hover tunnels to maintain an active state in a dropdown menu, it can take numerous attempts to reach their desired destinations on your website.

• Difficult Mobile Device Usage.
– Dropdown menus are difficult to read and navigate on tablets and smartphones. Especially if they are complicated or long, these menus are difficult to read on the screens of most mobile devices. If these menus are hover-activated, they are inoperative on touchscreens, and even clicking into site pages from a lengthy dropdown menu can take numerous attempts before you succeed. In general, the majority of dropdown menus now available on websites do not offer mobile-friendly navigation at a time when more people today access websites via small mobile digital devices that on desktop or laptop computers.

• Overloaded Homepage Options.
– Many websites designed for mobile device usage offer myriad navigation options on the homepage via complicated dropdown menus. Studies have shown that when presented with an overload of site navigation options, potential customers can become discouraged and demotivated to take action. Just as consumers confronted with too many different brands or models of a product selection in an appliance store often become confused, unable to make a purchasing choice, website users can have great difficulty in choosing products or services for purchase on your company site when too many options are available in dropdown menus.

By limiting the number of dropdown menus on your e-commerce website and keeping their content simple and easy to read, you will gain more interested visitors who will spend greater lengths of time on your site, often purchasing your brand products or services. When you present your brand and all that it offers via a few easily read and navigated dropdown menus on your site’s homepage, you will be pleased with your increasing numbers of new business customers, greater sales conversion rates and rising levels of profitability.