The importance of intuitive navigation on a charity website

Intuitive navigation is crucial for the success of any charity website. For most charities, their website serves as a gateway for potential donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, and other stakeholders to engage with the charity’s mission and activities, so it’s vital to make that process simple and positive.

So, how does navigation affect user experience, and why should charities aim to improve the navigation on their websites?

Intuitive exploring

A well-structured and clear navigation enhances user experience by making it easy for visitors to find the information they're seeking – everything is intuitively where they’d expect it to be, or very easily found. The outcomes from a more positive user experience are: longer stays on the site, increased engagement, and a higher likelihood of visitors returning in future.

A great example of this is implementing a simple top nav. Keep your top navigation bar uncluttered with no more than five or six of your most commonly visited links, to give visitors the direction they might be looking for at the top of the site.

Clear communication

An intuitive navigation structure helps to communicate the charity's purpose, programmes, goals, and most importantly, their impact. If visitors can quickly find relevant information, they are more likely to understand the charity's mission and be inspired to support it.

Be sure to stay away from ‘internal’ language – the people within your organisation understand those terms because they use them all the time, but a website visitor (and potential donor!) will feel excluded and lost if they don’t know what you’re saying.

Define your website’s pages carefully, and regularly make sure the page really does show a user what the page name suggests it will, even as the content continues to evolve. ‘About us’ pages are a common place where we see charities’ messages getting mixed and losing meaning; we’ll cover this in more detail below.

Build trust

Intuitive navigation fosters transparency, as it allows visitors to easily access the details about your charity, which gives them the confidence that you will use their donations as they would like them to be spent. Giving easy access to financial information, news, case studies and other important information can help build this trust.

While you might not mean to hide anything, by allowing your page content to become muddled, it can appear to a user like you’re holding something back from them. For that reason, it’s important to make the information they’re seeking about your charity easy to find on the website. Your ‘About us’ page should cover details about the organisation – your mission, vision, values, structure, and a ‘Meet the team’ section – it’s best not to talk too much about your work here. Having a separate page for ‘Our work’ or ‘What we do’ lets you show how you put it all into practice, linking to real stories about the fantastic difference you’ve made.

Increase donor conversion rates

Clear navigation ensures that potential donors can quickly find information about how to donate, get involved, or see other ways to support your cause. Well-structured navigation can lead to higher conversion rates by simplifying the user journey on the donation process.

Accessibility

Clear navigation benefits all users, including those with disabilities who may rely on assistive technologies. An accessible and intuitive navigation structure ensures that all visitors can access and engage with the website's content in the same seamless way.

Mobile-friendly design

Intuitive navigation is even more critical than ever, with many of our charity websites seeing the majority of their traffic coming from mobile devices. A responsive design with user-friendly navigation ensures that the website is easy to use on all devices.

Reduce bounce rates

Bounce rates (when visitors leave a site after viewing only one page) can be reduced by providing an intuitive navigation experience. If visitors can't find what they're looking for quickly, they're more likely to leave the site and explore other similar charity websites where they find greater levels of engagement.

Try looking at your site with fresh eyes, like a first-time visitor, and see how easy it would be to navigate to your most commonly taken actions (find support, donate, sign up, download resources, etc).

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Well-organised and clear navigation can have a positive impact your charity’s SEO efforts. Search engines favour websites with clear navigation, which helps improve search engine rankings and visibility.

With all of our website projects, we spend extensive time at the start of the project to really get to know the charity and their content requirements. This means that we can work closely with our clients to create well-structured and intuitive navigation structures that lead to higher levels of engagement and success for the charity.

If you are looking into redesigning and restructuring your charity website, please get in touch.