'Contact' link added to the main menu: +140% leads from Contact page
Commentary byLiftArchiveOur analysis, not theirsAdding a 'Contact' item to the main menu more than doubled visits to the Contact page and lifted leads from that page by 140%.
Cosentino, a building-materials maker, ran this test on its US site, and it was published as a VWO case study.
Before the test, the Contact page could only be reached from the footer.
- Contact page visits: more than doubled. This was the primary goal.
- Leads from the Contact page: +140%. The extra visits turned into real enquiries.
- Footer contact clicks barely changed, which suggests the menu link reached new visitors rather than moving footer clickers up.
- The win held when the team repeated the test in Canada and the UK.
The change
A 'Contact' item was added to the main menu; the footer link stayed.
Simplified mockup drawn by LiftArchive from the shared screenshots.
Control
On the US site, the Contact page was linked only from the footer. It was still Cosentino's third-largest source of US leads.
Variant
A 'Contact' item was added to the main desktop and mobile menus on every US page, styled like the other menu items and linking to the Contact page.
Why it likely won
Our reading of the result, not the practitioner's claim.
- Visitors who want to get in touch look in the main menu first. A footer-only link hides the page from anyone who doesn't scroll to the bottom.
- The Contact page already converted well, so sending more people there had a direct effect on leads.
- A visible menu item works on every page, so it catches intent wherever a visitor happens to be.
Caveats: The winner was called after one day, which is short and may miss weekly patterns, though repeat tests in Canada and the UK also won. Cosentino gets both business and consumer leads, so results may differ for a purely B2B site.
Who ran it
Cosentino ran this test and published the results (VWO case study). The numbers are theirs; the summary and commentary on this page are ours.
Read the original case study on Cosentino →
How to run this test on your site
- Hypothesis
- If we add a 'Contact' link to our main navigation, then more visitors will reach the Contact page and send enquiries because they no longer have to hunt for it in the footer.
- Primary metric
- Leads submitted from the Contact page
- Guardrails
- Total leads across all forms
- Lead quality or sales-accepted rate
- Clicks on other main menu items
- Who should test it
- Lead-gen sites where the contact page is a real lead source but is buried in the footer. It probably won't help much if contact options are already prominent, or if you want to steer visitors to a quote form or self-serve flow instead.
Questions
Should the contact link be in the main menu or the footer?
If enquiries matter to your business, put it in the main menu.
In this test, moving it into view more than doubled Contact page visits, while the footer link kept its own clicks.
Does adding a nav item hurt clicks on other menu items?
It can, so track clicks on your other key menu items as a guardrail.
Here the lead gain was large enough to outweigh any shift.
How long should a navigation test run?
Ideally at least one to two full weeks, to cover weekday and weekend behaviour.
This test was called after one day but was later confirmed in two more markets.