Why Your Website Needs a Junk Drawer

Why Your Website Needs a Junk Drawer

We all have that one drawer in our home—it’s filled with a tangled mess of batteries, spare keys, random lengths of string, scotch tape, and maybe a few rogue playing cards. This is the “junk drawer,” a quintessential part of the American household. 

While the content of each person’s drawer varies, the purpose is generally the same: to hold all the little things that aren’t used frequently enough to command space elsewhere. 

In many ways, your website has (or needs!) a junk drawer, too. Keep reading to learn why this small change can make a huge difference in how visitors experience your website and, ultimately, how effective your site is at converting visitors into customers.

The Problem with a Crowded Navigation Bar
When we think about what we want people to see on our websites, it’s easy to believe that everything is essential. After all, we’ve spent time curating content, products, services, and information, and each element feels vital. Our instinct is to give people as many options as possible right from the start, under the assumption that the more information a visitor has, the easier it will be for them to make a decision and convert into a customer.

But that assumption is wrong.

When people arrive at a website, they’re not looking for an encyclopedia’s worth of options. Most visitors want to find a few specific pieces of information as quickly and easily as possible. If your navigation bar is overloaded with options, it can lead to decision fatigue—too many choices at once make it harder to choose anything at all. Just ask the kid in line at Baskin Robbins. And when people feel overwhelmed by too many options, they often do what comes naturally: they leave the site.

The solution is a website “junk drawer” space in the page footer. Instead of crowding your navigation bar with secondary links, you can use junk drawer space for helpful but non-essential information—links to career opportunities, your “Contact Us” page, social media handles, legal disclaimers, and other supporting content. This way, your main navigation can stay streamlined and focused, guiding users exactly where you want them to go without distractions.

Think of Your Navigation Bar as Your Website’s “Granite Countertop”
Imagine your navigation bar as the equivalent of a sleek granite countertop in your kitchen. This countertop serves as a primary workspace—it’s where you cook, prep, and serve—and it works best when it’s free of clutter. In the same way, your navigation bar is the “prime real estate” of your website. The more streamlined it is, the better it does its job, helping users find what they’re looking for in a direct, intuitive way.

Unfortunately, as business owners, we often have an attachment to all the elements on our site, and that means we end up placing too much on the “counter.” This is often driven by a belief that if people see all of our content and resources, they’ll quickly understand our value and engage more deeply.

However, it’s usually the opposite: clutter in the navigation bar leads to cognitive overload, confusion, and even distrust. A cluttered navigation bar can appear chaotic, and chaos on a website equals an unfriendly user experience. Just as in the kitchen, we should keep the countertop as clear as possible so the primary tasks can happen seamlessly.

So, What’s the Website Junk Drawer?
The website junk drawer is where you can put all those useful but non-critical items that don’t need to live in the spotlight. It lives at the bottom of every page, providing an easily accessible place where users can find additional resources. Visitors can refer to it as needed without being distracted from the main message and call-to-action on the page.

For instance, your junk drawer might contain:

• Secondary Pages: Contact Us, Careers, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and legal disclaimers are all important, but they’re unlikely to be a visitor’s first stop. Putting them in the junk drawer allows users to find the information if and when they need it.

• Social Media Links: Instead of peppering these links in your header or navigation bar, placing them in the footer gives people a chance to find them without cluttering the main user journey.
  
  

The Impact of a Streamlined Navigation Bar
The navigation bar is the first thing people interact with on your site, so it’s critical to get it right. A clean, well-organized navigation bar guides users smoothly to your main offerings without making them pause to figure out where to go.

When visitors arrive at your site, they’re likely looking for a specific service, product, or piece of information. If the navigation bar is overloaded with options, they’re forced to mentally sift through everything to find what they need. This process can be frustrating and lead to higher bounce rates, especially on mobile devices where screen space is limited. But when the navigation is straightforward and curated, people can quickly find the path that leads them where they want to go, whether that’s a product page, a service listing, or a blog post.

As a StoryBrand Certified Guide, I’ve helped many clients refine their navigation bars by implementing junk drawers in their footers. Often, clients are initially skeptical. Like a well-intentioned kitchen organizer telling you to move items off the counter and into a drawer, it may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, aren’t all these links essential? But once they see the clean, uncluttered navigation bar in action, they quickly realize how much smoother the user experience becomes.

Less is More: The Psychological Principle at Play
The idea behind a junk drawer stems from a psychological concept called the paradox of choice. Studies have shown that too many choices often lead to decision fatigue. Instead of making an easy choice, people get overwhelmed and end up making no decision at all. This principle applies to websites just as it does to physical shopping environments. By reducing choices in the navigation bar, you’re guiding people along a clear path, which is much more effective than overwhelming them with all the options at once.

Choice paralysis is especially harmful online, where users can easily click away and find a competitor’s site instead. However, users are more likely to engage and convert with fewer, more focused choices.

Why Every Website Needs a Junk Drawer
The junk drawer is a subtle but powerful tool for improving your website’s user experience. When you declutter the main navigation and give non-essential links a home in the footer, you’re not only reducing overwhelm—you’re also allowing visitors to engage more meaningfully with the content that truly matters.

So, go ahead, create a junk drawer for your website. You’ll find that it brings clarity to your navigation, reduces visitor frustration, and ultimately makes your site more effective at converting visitors into happy customers.