Planning website architecture before wireframing, design and coding is essential for creating a user-centric and SEO-friendly site.
Website architecture refers to the hierarchical organization of your website's content, pages and navigation built via internal links. A well-structured website allows users to find what they're looking for and helps search engines better index your site.
website architecture
website architecture • [webˌsīt ɑrkəˌtɛkʧər]
The systematic arrangement of web pages to optimize usability and create a logical path to information.
noun
"The eComm platform's success was due to its intuitive website architecture, allowing users to quickly find what they needed"
Synonyms
Planning site architecture pays off when done intentionally 
and collaboratively. Slickplan's 
Sitemap Builder is a website architecture planning tool for creating structures that align with your business goals
and marketing plan.
Good website architecture provides a roadmap that allows you to plan, create and optimize new website pages effectively.
Enhance your site's visibility by organizing content logically and making it easier for search engine crawlers to index, ultimately improving site ranking.
An easy to navigate site with smart internal linking structure provides website visitors with intuitive pathways and easy access to relevant information.
Design user-friendly sites with Slickplan
It's more straightforward and less tricky than you might think, here's how to plan website structure effectively:
What are you trying to accomplish with your site?
Knowing exactly where you want to go - and where you want website visitors to go - allows you to plan site architecture that gets you there.
Because an ecommerce site and a website for a law office, for example, are going to have vastly different site architecture.
Website architecture design for ecommerce sites will require a lot of product pages along with plenty of category pages whereas a law office generally will have a flat website architecture with fewer layers of pages and more simple user interface.
Start by listing the goals for your own website, big and small, and include measurable goals like; increased traffic, conversions, signups, donations, purchases, engagement, etc.
Doing this will help you determine the ideal site architecture to use and whether it's better to start with a website architecture template or build from scratch.
Who are your people?
Gather important information about your target audience via strong user research; find out where they spend time online, where they shop, do target keyword research to discover the search volume for your keywords and demographic info like their age, location, country, language, etc.
Go deeper and learn the user behavior of your audience to help with web design planning, optimizing website content and shaping your website's structure.
Ideally, you'll have user personas that you've already built to help guide this. If not, this is a good time to create them.
Know who your audience is first; architecture design for website building next.
Do you have competition? (You do)
Understanding what your competitors are up to helps shape what you do and what you don't do. Look at their sites and note what's popular, what's on their main page, what's getting a lot of engagement, how's their site structure, what's not working, what can be improved? Use analytics tools to get into the details.
It's not about copying, competitor analysis is standard market research that all companies should be doing.
Rest assured, your competitors have scoped you out too, it's a core part of the search engine optimization process.
Information architecture (IA) is the part of your site architecture efforts that focuses on creating a logical and user-friendly structure that enables users to find and understand information easily.
Note, that IA is not something users will see but rather something they'll experience in the form of an intuitive movement from one page on your site to the next.
It goes hand in hand with your sitemap and establishes a clear structure for your site's information, dictating how it gets organized across your entire website.
The information architecture website planning process requires listing all parent pages with the child pages beneath; for an ecommerce store, that'd be a category page with product pages living underneath.
With your site's information in a hierarchical structure that goes from generalized to more specific, main categories to subcategories, you can solidify your website architecture and incorporate your site's content.
This is known as silo architecture and its advantage over other structures is that the resulting site is intuitive to navigate and primed for SEO success.
From there you can dictate your navigation menu and the relevant pages that will appear there, ensuring access to other pages is easily within reach. The world is your oyster in that sense and the only rules are to make it user-centric and able to accommodate growth without sacrificing performance or user experience.
Visualizing all of this with a website architecture diagram ensures you don't miss anything and makes the process more straightforward.
Proper information and website architecture aids in content management and scalability, allowing for the seamless addition of new content while maintaining an organized and user-friendly experience.
Great website architecture is built on strong internal linking because without internal links your site's pages are essentially little islands.
Well-planned internal links enhance navigation and user experience, enabling seamless movement between pages. They establish contextual relationships between different pages so use descriptive and relevant anchor text for each internal link to encourage deeper exploration of your site, reducing bounce rates and improving the distribution of link juice.
Strategic internal linking can promote important pages and direct users to key areas as well.
Additionally, internal links help search engines understand and index your website's pages more effectively, positively impacting search rankings.
A good way to go about this is to adopt the pillar-cluster approach, where the pillar is a parent page and the clusters are closely related child pages that support that pillar topic and connected with internal links.
Also known as click depth, this is about making sure your content doesn't get buried in a sea of pages and lost in never-ending clicks.
The best website architecture will ensure that users can find what they're looking for in as few clicks as possible.
Avoid deep website architecture and aim to have users navigate no more than 3 or 4 clicks to get where they want to be.
Shallow click depth has the added benefit of making it easier for search engine crawlers to index your site, helping you move up in the search results.
Breadcrumbs further enhance navigation and help users recognize where they are on your site. By displaying a trail of navigation links with arrows showing the path to the current page from the home page, it's easier for users to move back to previous pages and gain a better understanding of the website hierarchy.
This comes after the website planning process and once your site is already launched but it's a vital part of the site architecture workflow because it's a key link between search engines and that beautiful architecture you built.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website's URLs and associated information, aiding search engines in efficiently crawling and indexing your site.
While it's important to provide each search engine with a file, you'll also want to include something for users. Enter the HTML sitemap, a simple page listing all the pages on your site where you users can go if they can't find the specific page they're looking for.
As your site continues to grow and evolve, how do you ensure search engines keep up? Use an XML sitemap generator to automatically create an XML sitemap for each search engine whenever a web page is added, updated or removed, ensuring your sitemap stays up to date.
Free demo – See how Slickplan works
Let us show you how easy planning websites can be!
Unclear hierarchy leads to struggles with navigation, missed content and higher bounce rates for users and indexing issues for search engines.
How to avoid: Organize content in a logical sequence and connect pages based on importance and relevance to ensure an intuitive user experience.
Failing to sync site structure with a user's journey makes it harder for them to find what they're looking for and in the process lowers conversions.
How to avoid: Plan site architecture to align with the typical journey of a user, making information easily accessible at each step and just a few clicks away, max.
Subpar URL structure hampers SEO, making it difficult for search engines to interpret content and confusing users, potentially discouraging clicks.
How to avoid: Create concise, user-friendly and keyword-rich URLs that reflect your site's hierarchy, helping users understand page content and boosting search engine rankings.
Whether you're starting from scratch or improving the architecture of a website that already exists, it's easy to get started on your site architecture diagram in Slickplan's Sitemap Builder.
Here's how to structure a website from the dashboard:
Previous
Optimize navigation for users and search engine crawlers by getting a bird’s-eye view of your site's structure, internal linking and organization with a visual sitemap generator.
Next
Check out our always-free sitemap tool, upgrade to a free 14-day trial at any time to test all features and get access to all of Slickplan’s website planning tools.
Use Slickplan's dedicated Sitemap Builder to create user-friendly, accessible and instinctive sites that take people where they want to go.
I make a lot of decisions based on the integrity of companies – not just the features. This makes you stand out. Thanks!
Barnabas Helmy, Founder at SmashToast, Inc.
Create an account
Already have an account
