Sticky Menus Are Quicker To Navigate

Most designers would agree that navigation is one of the most critical components of a website. Despite this, it is not always easy to use or access. Traditionally, users must scroll back to the top of the website to access the navigation menu. Hyrum Denney recently wondered whether sticky menus makes websites quicker to navigate, and he conducted a usability study to find the answer.

CSS is a great way to implement sticky navigation. It also seems to be the most straightforward, most lightweight and quickest to code. The three things to pay attention to are position, margin-top and z-index. Setting the menu’s position to fixed disables the element from scrolling with the rest of the page. This will likely throw off your margins if your navigation is horizontal, so you’ll want to adjust for that. Finally, use z-index with a horizontal menu to make sure the navigation sits on top of everything; this will make the other content slide underneath the navigation as you scroll.