Navigation & Layout

Key Takeaways

• "My Bets" is the only universal bottom bar item: All 5 sites using a persistent 5-item bottom bar (Bet365 logged-in, Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, Betfair, Sky Bet) include it. Home appears in 4 of 5. In-Play appears in just 1 of 5 (Bet365 logged-in only).
• Primary nav breadth ranges from 4 to 13 items across betting sites: Coral has 4 (Sports, Poker, Casino, Bingo), BetVictor and Unibet have 5, Paddy Power and Midnite both hit 13. Outside industry: Netflix uses 2, Revolut and Spotify use 4.
• In-Play reaches the primary nav on 6 of 14 betting sites: Ladbrokes, BetVictor, BetMGM, Midnite, 888sport (labelled "Live"), and Paddy Power all surface it as a top-level tap. William Hill and Sky Bet relegate it to a secondary scrollable strip.
• No betting site surfaces deposit, wallet, cashier, or balance in its logged-out navigation: Even Bet365's logged-in bottom bar uses a generic "Account" icon rather than an explicit deposit shortcut — the only outside-industry site to surface anything equivalent is Deliveroo, with a persistent Basket icon.

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Detailed Analysis

Two structural patterns divide the 14 betting sites. Five — Bet365 (logged-in capture), Ladbrokes, Paddy Power, Betfair, and Sky Bet — use a persistent 5-item bottom navigation bar as their primary mobile interface. Their compositions are similar but not identical: My Bets appears in all five; Home in four (absent from Paddy Power's bottom bar, which instead shows Find, My Bets, Blackjack, Roulette, Gaming); a casino or gaming entry in three (Betfair with Casino, Paddy Power with Blackjack/Roulette/Gaming, Sky Bet with Games). In-Play features in only one of these five bottom bars — Bet365 logged-in (Home, Search, In-Play, My Bets, Account) — suggesting most bottom-bar operators treat In-Play as a secondary destination rather than a persistent shortcut. The remaining 9 sites (William Hill, Unibet, BetVictor, Betway, 888sport, BetMGM, Midnite, Coral, and the logged-out Bet365 capture) use a horizontal top bar with product-category labels, supplemented in most cases by a secondary scrollable sport strip.

Top-level item counts reveal very different philosophies about what belongs in a primary nav. BetVictor and Unibet keep it to 5 items (Sports, In-Play, Casino, Live Casino, Offers and Sports, Casino, Live Casino, Bingo, Poker respectively). William Hill and Betway sit at 6. BetMGM expands to 9 (Sports, Casino, Live Casino, Featured, All Sports, In-Play, Golden Goals, Search, My Bets), mixing product categories with utility actions. Midnite is the most loaded at 13 items, combining sport shortcuts (Football, Racing, Greyhounds, Virtuals, Tennis, Basketball, Cricket) with casino products (Slots, Roulette, Blackjack) and utility items (Find, In-Play, Acca Builder) in a single horizontal strip — a high-density approach that blurs the hierarchy between sports, casino, and tools. Paddy Power also reaches 13 but achieves it differently, distributing items across the full page: the homepage nav includes authentication (Sign Up, Login), sport shortcuts (Football, Horse Racing, In-Play, Lotteries, Greyhound Racing, Golf), and gaming (Blackjack, Roulette, Gaming) alongside My Bets and Find.

Tap count to key destinations varies more than the pattern groupings suggest. Football is 1 tap on Ladbrokes (explicit "Football" in primary nav) and reachable from Paddy Power's homepage nav directly. On BetVictor, Betway, and BetMGM it requires tapping "Sports" first — 2 taps. Sites using a scrollable sport strip (Bet365, William Hill, Sky Bet) technically offer 1-tap access but require the user to locate football within a scroll. Login is uniformly 1 tap across all sites that present a homepage — the exception is Sky Bet's football and racing captures, which landed on a registration form showing only a "Login" link, indicating those captures hit the new-customer acquisition flow rather than the main site. Three separate Sky Bet captures (football ×2, racing ×2) all show the same Step 1 of 2 registration form — no sport betting content is accessible without creating an account in this flow. Similarly, all three Coral captures (homepage, football, racing) render the same "Football Super Series" quiz splash page rather than any betting interface, making Coral's nav structure effectively unanalysable from this data.

The outside-industry sites reveal how navigation-heavy betting products are by comparison. Netflix uses 2 nav items (logo + Sign In) and puts its entire acquisition funnel into a hero email field. Revolut organises its 4 nav items by audience type (Personal, Business, Kids & Teens, Company) — segmentation rather than product or action. Spotify's 4 items (Home, Search, Your Library, Account/Menu) are purely functional. Deliveroo's 5-item nav (home, Partner with us, Basket, Sign up or log in, Account) is the only outside-industry example to surface a transactional financial shortcut — the Basket — as a persistent nav item. That contrasts with every betting site in this dataset, where deposit, balance, and cashier actions are absent from the logged-out nav entirely, and even the one logged-in capture (Bet365) uses a generic Account icon rather than a labelled deposit shortcut. ESPN's 13-item nav is the structurally closest peer to a betting site, but organises entirely around sport content (Football, NFL, NBA, F1, Rugby, MMA, Cricket, MLB, More Sports) with no financial or account actions in the bar at all.

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Implications for BoyleSports

• BoyleSports data was blank in this dataset, so it is not possible to confirm which of these patterns BoyleSports already implements. The points below are observations about competitor behaviour that should be checked against the live BoyleSports product before drawing conclusions about gaps.

• The In-Play placement split is worth examining. 6 of 14 betting sites (Ladbrokes, BetVictor, BetMGM, Midnite, 888sport, Paddy Power) surface In-Play as a primary nav item; the other 8 push it to a scrollable strip or omit it from persistent navigation. Given that In-Play is excluded from 4 of the 5 bottom bars where My Bets appears, there's a clear industry question about whether In-Play is a destination worth a permanent nav slot or a contextual feature — competitors are not aligned on this.

• Deposit/wallet access post-login is a structural gap in the data. All 14 betting site captures were logged-out (except Bet365's logged-in capture, which uses a generic "Account" icon). No competitor surfaces a labelled deposit shortcut in their primary navigation. Whether there is an opportunity to give deposit/balance more prominent placement in a logged-in state — as Deliveroo does with its persistent Basket — cannot be confirmed or denied from this data, but it is a pattern no betting competitor has visibly adopted here, which may itself be a signal.