3 Signs Your Client’s Site Has Outgrown Its Navigation
While working on Monocle Search, I’ve observed that the moment a site becomes valuable is often the moment it becomes harder to navigate.
Valuable means different things depending on who you ask. For your client, it’s the blog they’ve been writing for three years; the product catalog that now has 200 items; the course library they’re proud of. For you as the web designer, it’s the site that’s grown into something real: multiple content types, a membership site, a proper conversion flow—a site worth putting in a portfolio.
You’ve seen what happens next: The navigation gets patched as content grows, categories multiply, dropdowns get added; and somewhere along the way, visitors get lost.
Think about the last 10 Squarespace sites you built. How much time did you spend on the information architecture, the conversion flow, the mobile experience? Now ask yourself: how much time did you spend on search?
If you’re like most Squarespace professionals I talk to, search was historically a 10-minute job. You’d drop in a bar, put an icon in the header, and it’d be done—straight on to the things that feel like design decisions.
But think about how you navigate your own tools—Notion, Linear, your file system. You probably don’t browse menus. You pull up your computer’s default search feature and type what you want. Your client’s visitors aren’t so different.
I did this, too, for a long time. It took building Monocle Search to make me really look at what happens when search is treated as a utility versus when it’s treated as a core part of how people use a site. The difference is bigger than I expected.
Take the Australian store So Much Stuff, which has everything from camping gear to Warhammer figurines. Since they made a search bar the central user interface on their site, all of their goods are now only a few taps away. This year, they’ll take things even further with a full site redesign, moving all site navigation through Monocle.
Here are three signals I now look for to evaluate whether a client’s site needs to upgrade their search game:
Signal 1: The navigation has gotten complicated
There are dropdowns inside dropdowns; categories that overlap; and a nav bar that has grown organically and now nobody quite agrees on how it’s organized.
This happens to almost every site with increasing amounts of content (and has happened more often to me than I care to admit). The structure that made sense at 20 pages starts to crack at 80. And here’s the tricky part: the people closest to the site—you and your client—stop noticing. You’ve learned the structure, but the visitors walk in cold.
Nielsen Norman Group’s research on recognition versus recall puts a name to what’s going on. Navigation asks visitors to remember where things might be. Search asks them to type what they want and spot the right result. One of those is a lot easier. When the navigation gets complex enough that visitors can’t confidently predict where to click, search becomes the faster path.
A simple test: during your next site review, if you hesitate even briefly about where something lives, your client’s visitors are hesitating too.
Signal 2: The content has a long tail
Valuable content stays invisible unless someone happens to find it 11 tabs deep.
Here’s something that took me a while to fully get: for clients with membership sites or course libraries, search isn’t just a navigation tool. It’s a sales tool.
When search surfaces member content in its results, prospective members preview exactly what they'd pay for. Here’s how this plays out in practice: A visitor finds something interesting, clicks through, hits the paywall, and suddenly has a very concrete reason to sign up. Most sites leave that conversion path completely untapped.
The same logic applies to any site with a long tail of content: 80 blog posts, 200 products, a resource library that’s grown over three years. The content is there, but without search, it stays invisible unless someone happens to stumble onto page 4 of an archive.
John Sweller’s work on Cognitive Load Theory explains the mechanics: When visitors have to browse, interpret, and guess their way through a site, they’re burning energy on the site’s structure instead of what they intended to do. Most visitors will give up before they find what they need.
For clients who’ve invested heavily in content, this is one of the most effective fixes.
Signal 3: Mobile traffic is dominant and engagement is dropping
There’s an asymmetry worth sitting with: you design on a desktop or laptop, but many of your client’s visitors are on mobile—pull up the analytics!
On mobile devices and tablets, the navigation that you spent hours working on is hidden behind an icon.
Deep hierarchies mean multiple taps, and scanning is slower. So on mobile, search stops being a fallback, and instead it becomes the primary way people discover content and products. If search is weak or limited, you’re letting down the visitors who are trying their hardest to engage with your client’s site.
If engagement depth is dropping on mobile while desktop holds steady, this is often where the problem lives.
Recall So Much Stuff, the Australian store shown above? During the 2025 holiday rush, when things were at their busiest in-store, staff used the website search directly from their phones to check stock levels on the fly—often faster than jumping onto a work computer.
Where this is all heading
It’s worth flagging for web designers: what counts as good search is constantly changing, particularly in the era of AI. Visitors want to ask a question and get a direct answer, not a list of links. This is now possible on Squarespace.
Hybrid search combines keyword and semantic matching so results show up even when the exact word isn’t on the page. For example, a search for “car” finds pages that only use the term “automobile.” And AI-generated answers can respond to natural language questions using only the site’s own content, like a knowledgeable assistant who’s read every page and stays strictly on topic.
Full disclosure: This is exactly what we built Monocle Search to do. But whatever tool you use, the conversation is worth having early in a project—not as a checkbox at the end.
The bottom line
As a web designer, you sweat the details—the typography, the spacing, the way a hover state feels. You notice when something is two pixels off because that’s your craft.
Search is one part of the site where most of us have been phoning it in for years—a default bar, a default result page, no further thought. Meanwhile, it’s often the first thing a visitor reaches for when they need to find something.
A search bar that works turns a complex site into a simple one. The structure can grow as much as it needs to without impacting the user experience.
If you recognize any of these signals in a current or upcoming project, try to give search the same attention you give everything else. Your clients hired you because you care about the details; this one is worth caring about.
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