Your Main Menu Has Too Many Items

Take a firm that drills water wells. The menu reads:

Home | About us | Why choose us | Prices | Services | Discounts |
Special offers | For partners | Careers | Our equipment |
Ask a question | Gallery | Contacts

Now be the visitor. You want a well drilled on your property, and what you actually want to know is what it will cost and whether these people can do it.

Going through it as a customer

• Home — not needed, but it is the default item. Keep.
• About us — I will hire anyone who does good work at a fair price. Cut.
• Why choose us — a page of adjectives written by the company about itself. Cut.
• Prices — this is what I came for. Keep.
• Services — are the services not listed on the prices page? Cut.
• Discounts — if there is always a discount, the price was inflated to allow for it. Cut.
• Special offers — same page, different name. Cut.
• For partners — I am a customer, not a reseller. Cut.
• Careers — I am not job hunting, and if I were I would look elsewhere. Cut.
• Our equipment — photographs of trucks. If they matter, they belong in the gallery. Cut.
• Ask a question — I assumed the contact page was for that. Cut.
• Gallery — finished work, actual holes in actual ground. Keep.
• Contacts — keep.

Four items left:

Home | Prices | Gallery | Contact

Where the rest goes

Cutting an item is not deleting the content. Almost everything on that list has a better home than the main menu.

• About us — two sentences at the bottom of the front page. For this company the whole proposition fits under the logo: "We drill wells."
• Services — merge into prices. "Services and prices" if you must, but plain "Prices" is what people search for.
• Discounts — put them in the price list itself, ideally as something the visitor can apply to see their own number.
• Special offers — a banner, with dates on it. If an offer runs permanently it is not an offer, it is the price.
• For partners, Careers — the footer. People looking for those will scroll; nobody else needs to see them.
• Our equipment — the gallery.
• Ask a question — the contact page already is that.

The footer is not a graveyard. It is where low-traffic, high-intent pages belong: whoever wants your careers page will find it there, and everyone else gets a menu they can read at a glance.

Shorten the labels too

Menu items are scanned, not read. "Proposal for intermediaries" becomes "Partners". "Save to drafts" becomes "Drafts". "Product catalogue" becomes "Catalogue". "Authorisation" becomes "Sign in". Nobody is confused by the shorter version.

Watch out for words that are technically correct and read oddly to a visitor. "Contacts" is the classic one — in English it suggests a list of people or the things in your phone. "Contact" is what you want.

If everything really must be in the menu

Then make it a dropdown with a structure someone can predict — grouped by what the visitor is trying to do, not by your internal departments. In Joomla that means nesting menu items under a small number of top-level parents and letting the template render the levels.

But check the assumption first. A menu that needs thirteen entries usually means the site is trying to serve several unrelated audiences on one set of pages, and that is a content problem which no amount of navigation design will fix.