Header

A website's header should be highly focused on the user's experience for easy navigation to the actual content.

This means removal of everything potentially distracting the user from finding what is important, and adding only what is necessary to find the content.

The more clicks required to find the content, the more time the user will need to spend, potentially resulting in a reduced ranking.

What should be in the header?

Link to important "pre-visit" information pages

Most websites have dozens- if not several hundred information pages related to the website, like About us, Contact us, and more.

When deciding which of all these pages should be linked to from the header, simply pick those few pages which has relevant information for the user to consider reading prior to continuing the visit on the website.

For an e-commerce website this could be information like "Freight & Delivery", "Customer Service" and "Our Stores" - if the organization has physical stores in addition to the e-commerce store.

For a general company website with a limited set of information pages overall, simply skipping having any "top links" to these pages should be consider, and instead keep the links in the Navigation section further down on the website.

For websites that are not naturally familiar to most visitors upon its first visit, a top link to the "About Us" should be considered as many visitors wants to learn briefly about those behind the website then entered. In addition to that, a link to "Our Team"- or "Our Employees" page should also be considered, as such pages normally adds an additional layer of transparency and trustworthiness to the website.

A website search

For websites with more than roughly 100 pages (e.g unique URLs), a website search should be present.

Presented clearly in the header as a search input, this will give the user a potential one-click navigation to the wanted content, resulting in a great UX.

For websites with thousands of pages, a good website search is crucially important. This means the use of a solid search engine like ElasticSearch, Solr, Algolia or some other search solution. It also means that the search engine needs to be correctly implemented in the website and not least continuously optimized in terms of alias handling and other logics to make sure the users always gets a result. As part of this you must also be sure to continuously analyze the usage of the website search in terms of zero-results.

Other website-specific elements

For websites with functionality for users to register, both a "Register" and "Log In" link or mini-form should be present.

In addition, for e-commerce websites, links or buttons to the "My Cart" and eventual "My Wishlist" must also be present in the header.