How many clicks does it take to find something on your website?
I'm sure I didn't invent this concept but I don't know who to credit it to and it's so obvious it's got to have been invented multiple times by now anyway. Web golf is an accessibility test where you ask "what's the fewest clicks it takes to answer this question, starting from your home page?" I propose that the largest acceptable "par" for this game is six. Rules and examples after the break.
Rules
- Opening a drop-down and then selecting an item from it is two clicks.
- Using the table of contents to jump to a section of a large page is one click.
- Navigating a large page without a table of contents costs one click per screen scrolled (especially bad for mobile sites).
- Using a search box or chat widget is only allowed if the keyword to search for is given in the query or on the site itself, and in that case it still counts as two clicks, equivalent to a very large drop-down.
Examples
Here are some queries off the top of my head, and my proposed par for each one.
What is the name of your business?
Par 0. There is no excuse to not have this on your home page.
Who pays the bills around here?
Par 1. Home -> About Us.
Do you have public contact info, like a phone number?
Par 2. The worst case scenario should be something like Home -> About -> Contact.
Is [person] on this site?
Par 3. Assuming you know the person's name, this is something like Home -> Search [name] -> Go -> [check the person's page to make sure they're not someone else].
Hey, what happened to that video from 12 years ago, did it get deleted?
Par 4. Home -> Search [title] -> Go -> Include Removed Pages -> [name of video].
Aww, sucks, but at least you didn't spend four hours on a wild goose chase. Bonus points if the page tells you why the video was removed, too.
Hey, you made a windows executable game in like 2001 and it had some really obscure bug that required opening a file in notepad and changing a line manually, what was that fix again?
Par 5. There are lots of ways to do this, but a plausible one is Home -> Forums -> Archive -> Obscure Game Title -> Known Issues (pinned thread) -> Obscure Fix (linked in table of contents).
Limitations
You can put about twenty things on a page before most people's eyes glaze over. This suggests that the maximum size for a par=6 website is 20^6 = 64 million pages. As of September 18, 2023, English Wikipedia has about 59 million articles, which means it's just about to come up on that limit, and may be the first website to actually have a par of 7. Fascinating.
Most websites are not Wikipedia [citation needed] so really you shouldn't be worried about queries worse than par=6. If you need more than six clicks, or worse, if you need some sort of AI chatbot plugin to load and bumble around for a bit and then you need six clicks, then your website is traaaaaash.
