How to organise your menu structure

Designing main menu, service menu, and footer menu — three menus, three roles. Includes the must-have pages every plant webshop needs to show.

Written By Bas den Hoed

Once you've decided on a category structure, the next question is where each category — and each non-product page — actually lives in your shop. Most resellers treat the menu as one undifferentiated thing: "the navigation". It isn't. A working webshop has three menus, each with its own purpose, its own audience, and its own rules. Mixing them is the single most common navigation mistake we see in plant shops.

💡 The most common mistake: trying to fit all 14 product categories in the main menu. The main menu is not a catalog — it's a compass. And you don't have one menu, you have three.

Three menus, three roles

Every well-built webshop has three navigation areas. Each has a different job:

  • Main menu (top navigation, sometimes called primary nav) — the path to your products. Categories, and only categories. Plus a Sale entry on the right.

  • Service menu (top-right, or sometimes inside the hamburger only) — the path to buying-related actions. Contact, Customer service, B2B / Quote requests, Account / Login.

  • Footer menu — the path to everything else a serious customer wants to verify before they trust you with money. About us, policies, delivery info, FAQ, payment methods, business registration.

Each menu answers a different question. The main menu answers "what do you sell?". The service menu answers "what do I do if I need help?". The footer menu answers "who are you and can I trust you?". Mixing those questions in one menu makes all three harder to find.

The main menu is your shop's navigation skeleton. The rules:

  • 5–7 items, no more. Beyond seven and customers stop scanning and start choosing from a list. That's slower, and it converts worse. If you have 12 categories, you don't need 12 menu items — you need 5–7 menu items with sub-categories underneath (see mega menu).

  • Product categories only. Not Contact. Not Login. Not the full catalog. Categories.

  • Sale always rightmost, ideally with a colour accent (red, orange, or your brand's high-energy colour). Customers scan for it.

  • Order: most-important to least-important, left to right. Eye-tracking studies are decades old and consistent on this — the leftmost menu items get the most clicks. Put your highest-margin or highest-volume category there.

A working main menu for a typical plant shop looks like:

Houseplants · Outdoor plants · Gifts · Value bundles · Inspiration · Sale

Six items. Houseplants left because it's the year-round volume driver. Outdoor plants second because it's the seasonal money. Gifts and bundles in the middle because they cross-sell. Inspiration (blog / care guides / round-ups) sixth because it builds trust without competing with product clicks. Sale rightmost. The full category structure from how to build your product category structure sits underneath these top-level items via the mega menu.

The service menu

The service menu is the discreet companion to the main menu. It's usually in the top-right corner of the header on desktop, often as small text or icons, and it sometimes lives only inside the mobile hamburger. What belongs there:

  • Contact — direct path to email, phone, or contact form.

  • Customer service — your support hub or FAQ.

  • B2B / Quote requests — only if you have a B2B audience. Many plant resellers do (interior stylists, cafés, offices, garden centers re-buying). If yes, give it a clear entry point.

  • Account / Login — for repeat customers checking orders.

  • Optional: Wishlist, Track order, Language/region selector if relevant.

The service menu is intentionally low-prominence: small text, often grey, top-right. That's deliberate. A first-time visitor isn't logging in — they're shopping. The service menu is for the smaller pool of returning customers and prospects who need a non-product action.

The footer is where most resellers underspend their effort, and it's a mistake. A surprisingly high share of conversion-curious visitors scroll to the footer before adding to cart, especially on smaller plant shops where the brand is still unfamiliar. They're checking: who runs this, what's the return policy, is this a real Dutch business, what payment methods work, is there a phone number. The footer answers all of that in one block.

What belongs in the footer:

  • About us — see the dedicated section below; this is one of the most-visited pages on smaller plant shops.

  • Policies — Returns, Privacy, Terms & conditions, Cookies. See policies.

  • Delivery / Shipping — clear page on lead times, costs, free-shipping threshold, countries served.

  • FAQ — link to your support hub.

  • Payment methods — iDEAL, Bancontact, Klarna, PayPal, credit card icons. See trust badges.

  • Business info — KvK number, BTW/VAT number, business address. Required by Dutch law for ecommerce, and a quiet trust signal.

  • Social media icons — Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest if relevant. Plant shops live on visual platforms.

  • Newsletter sign-up — small, optional.

About us — make it findable

This deserves its own callout, because it's where the most resellers leak trust. About us is consistently a top-3 most-visited page on smaller plant shops — often above some of the product categories themselves. Visitors check who's behind the shop before they buy from a brand they don't recognise.

That means About us must be findable. Two acceptable placements:

  • In the main menu — usually leftmost or just before Inspiration. Works for shops that lean heavily on a personal brand (founder-led, small team, story-driven).

  • Prominently in the footer — first item in the first column. Works for most shops.

What does not work: hiding About us three clicks deep, or making it a single-line link in a 30-link footer. If you find yourself debating whether About us should be in the menu, the answer is yes — at least in the footer's top slot. For what should actually be on the page, read about us page.

What does NOT belong in the main menu

Specific anti-patterns we see repeatedly in plant shops:

  • Filters. "Pet-friendly", "Pot size 12cm", "Under €25" — those are filters on collection pages, not navigation items. Read filters and product attributes.

  • "Shop all" or "All products". Nobody clicks this. The whole point of a navigation is to narrow down — a "shop all" link is an admission that the rest of the menu didn't work.

  • Login / Account. Belongs in the service menu.

  • Contact. Service menu and footer.

  • Every sub-category. If you have 14 categories, the answer is hierarchy (top-level + mega menu sub-categories), not 14 menu items.

  • Promotions or campaigns. "Mother's Day 2026" doesn't belong as a permanent menu item — it belongs as a hero on the homepage and as a featured slot in the mega menu during the campaign window.

Required pages, by menu

A useful sanity-check before you publish — every plant shop's menus should contain at minimum:

Main menu (5–7 items): 4–6 product categories + Sale.

Service menu (3–5 items): Contact, Customer service / FAQ, Account, optional B2B.

Footer (2–3 columns): About us, Returns policy, Privacy policy, Terms & conditions, Cookies, Delivery info, FAQ, Payment methods, Business info (KvK + BTW), social icons.

If any of those are missing, the menu isn't done.

Mobile is a different beast

Almost everything above assumes desktop. Mobile collapses the main menu into a hamburger, the service menu often disappears or merges with the hamburger, and the footer becomes a long stack. The structural rules still apply — three menus, three roles — but the visual treatment is different. The detail belongs in the next article: how to design a mega menu, which covers desktop multi-column menus and their mobile accordion equivalent.

What to do tomorrow

Open your shop's theme settings (Shopify: Online Store → Navigation; WooCommerce: Appearance → Menus). You'll find one or more menu objects already configured — most themes ship with at least Main menu and Footer menu. Audit each one: is every item where it belongs? Drag the wrong items out — Contact out of Main, full catalog links out of Main, Login out of Main. Create a third menu if you don't have one yet (Custom service menu / Header secondary menu — naming varies by theme). Build the three menus to match the lists above. Then move on to designing the mega menu that hangs underneath the main menu.