Magento – Making The Most of Layered Navigation

Something that may go unnoticed for many Magento developers is the layered navigation section that appears in the <?php echo $this->getChildHtml('left') ?> call. The information that this provides should be very prominent on the page as it makes your site much easier to browse through for a customer, meaning they’ll reach the product they want faster, meaning you’re more likely to make a sale.

The script reads important information about your products such a:

• The sub-categories they’re in
• The price ranges they fit in to
• Attributes that separate them such as colour and manufacture

This means it’s very worthwhile creating as many attributes for your products as you can so that a browsing customer can narrow their search even further as the attributes of all the products filter down. This also increases a product’s prominence in a store search. For example if you add the attribute manufacturer and give a section of your products the value ‘Sony’, this will provide pretty much a new sub-category called ‘Sony’ in your layered navigation, as well as make all those items come up in a search for Sony in the store search.

For more about how to use Layered Navigation, watch this video and start enjoying its benefits.