Website Navigation Best Practices for a Ten-Page Site: Fewer Items, Clearer Words
Hannah Feld -
What should the menu of a ten-page site look like? Short, in the visitor's words, with a second route to every page. Ten pages fit in a menu of five or six items, plus a search field or a link to the FAQ.
The rest of this note is why that works, and a test you can run in fifteen minutes.
Clicks matter less than clarity
The old advice says everything must be three clicks away. Nielsen Norman Group calls that rule unsupported by data in any published study to date. The same article gives a sharper example: on NYC.gov, reporting a broken water meter takes three clicks, but the final link is the 133rd item in a long list. The count was low and the page was still hard to use.
On a ten-page site the click count is rarely the problem. The labels are.
NN/g's advice on this is that menu labels should signal where a link leads, and it warns against vague or branded terms. If a visitor must guess what "Solutions" holds, they will open the wrong thing first.
How many items
Seven is the number people quote. NN/g mentions the "no more than seven main categories" rule in the same article as another UX myth that pulls against the three-click rule, so treat seven as a ceiling for comfort, not a law. For ten pages, group related ones: pricing and ordering together, delivery and returns together, about and contact together. Leave the legal pages in the footer.
On a phone, the menu usually folds into one icon. Put the one or two things visitors need most outside it: a search field or a visible link to questions.
A second way to every page
The W3C's Understanding Success Criterion 2.4.5 says that, at Level AA, more than one way should be available to locate a page in a set of pages. The listed techniques include links between related pages, a site map and a search function, and a single technique alone does not meet it. Pages that only exist as a step in a process, such as a confirmation, are exempt.
For a small site, that means: the menu, plus links inside the text between related pages, plus a link to the FAQ. If you add search, the guide on empty search results shows how to keep it from ending in a dead page.
Test the menu with five tasks
Write five things a visitor comes to do. Hand a phone to someone who has not seen the site, give one task at a time and count taps from the home page. Note where they hesitated.
| Task | Taps to the answer | Where they paused | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Find the price of the main service | |||
| Find how to contact you | |||
| Find the return or cancel rule | |||
| Find a page about a specific topic | |||
| Find the opening hours or delivery time |
Copy the table, fill it in, and fix the row with the longest pause first. A hesitation tells you more than the count: it usually points to a label that does not match what the person had in mind.
Navigation will not rescue a page that has no answer on it. If five testers reach the right page and still cannot find the detail, move the detail higher on the page.