Even without seeing the entire sitemap, users are able to get a good understanding of how the website is structured. This directly makes a site more intuitive and improves usability. Creating a solid website structure is a key step https://globalcloudteam.com/ in designing and developing a user-friendly website with a great UX. By purposefully linking pages in order to establish a clear hierarchy between pages, designers are able to improve the usability and navigation of their website.

The resulting organization can help build the backbone of your site navigation. By centering your design process on your unique visitors, your navigation structure may look and function differently than a navigation structure on another site, and that’s a good thing. How you structure your website navigation depends on your target audience, and what format you think would be most intuitive and accessible to them. Let’s look at a few of the most common types of website navigation you can choose from.

Offering options to get from one side of a site to another can be done through navigational links on every page. Effective organization makes for an effective product no matter if it’s one page website vs multiple pages. For a single page, that organization may come in the form of information architecture rather than full-on site structure. Using one of the four main website structure types makes it super simple to provide that experience. To state the somewhat obvious, disorganization isn’t good for anyone’s needs. Having some form of website organization is key to the user experience and your site’s visitors completing intended tasks.

The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website and you want to make the best possible use of it. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage. The unstructured website will lead to higher bounce rate resulting in lower visibility of your site.

Hierarchical Structures

The last thing you want is to make a visitor feel unwelcome when they land on your nonprofit’s site. In the example above, the yellow page is a grandchild page of a red page. We generally recommend allowing visitors to expand the portion of the navigation they’re most interested in to provide a strong browsing experience when screen space is limited. For most websites, you’ll want your navigation to collapse into a more compact display to work well on a smaller mobile screen. Use our sample sitemap and website tips to create a structure that appeals to supporters and participants.View the Driven by Programs structure. We’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits over the years, and while each is unique, we’ve seen some themes emerge when it comes to creating a strong website structure.

  • Therefore as a marketing enthusiast, you should be able to construct your website in an easy-to-navigate way to not lose your potential customers.
  • A simple WordPress website might have only a few components that include a homepage, an archive page and then the blog posts.
  • The balance between “width” and “depth” makes the content easily accessible.
  • It also helps you visualize all of the categories, subcategories and pages on your site.
  • There is a vast range of categories, and this type of structure can easily support their display for the site users.
  • Lastly, an intentional structure helps prevent keyword cannibalization.
  • This predictability makes it easier for users and search engine crawlers alike to understand and navigate your website.

If you add a new unique tag to every post or article, you’re not structuring anything. Make sure each tag is used at least twice, and that your tags group articles that genuinely belong together. Furthermore, it’s not always necessary to put everything in just one menu. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site.

Not only does this element makes user lives easier but it also helps search bots to understand the site’s hierarchy. An effective structure helps make content more relevant for search intents. It allows for a better distribution of content across the web pages according to different topics and queries. A good website structure increases the chances of getting sitelinks and other SERP features.

Utilize Heading Hierarchy

Web sites with too shallow an information hierarchy depend on massive menu pages that can degenerate into a confusing laundry list of unrelated information. Menu schemes can also be too deep, burying information beneath too many layers of menus. Having to navigate through layers of nested menus before reaching real content is frustrating (fig. 3.2). Learn why every ecommerce site needs an internal search engine, how internal search works, and how to design the effective one. Build internal links with informative and relevant anchor texts.

Website structure example

However, you shouldn’t face this issue with the right structure as all content should be linked to from at least one other page. Topical SEO is a big deal, and your site’s structure is a key way to showcase how different pages and posts are connected. All in all, planning your website structure is by far one of the best things you can do to make your website the best it can be. Use this guide to help you get started with planning your website structure and make the most out of this endeavor.

In addition to matching the way your audience instinctually organizes your site, you’ll want to think of how to best optimize your navigation terms for search. Some sites may be better served by action-oriented navigations. To know when this is appropriate, ask your audience whether they primarily come to your website to learn about something, or to take an specific action.

What Should Be Included In Your Website Navigation Bar?

Think about your target audience and the reasons why they might visit your website. Then, structure your site’s pages and content according to the information they’ll find most useful. You also should use internal links to direct visitors to other, specialized pages within your site if they want more detailed information. Using breadcrumbs and internal linking can help ensure pages aren’t buried deep in your site, but visualizing your structure can help when planning to keep content within these three levels. Here’s a great example of the importance of getting navigation right. The second image clearly helps users navigate the right products as easily as possible, whereas the first one goes no deeper than top-level generic categories.

Website structure example

“You can also use tools like Yoast SEO on WordPress to make sure all your pages are SEO friendly,” Reeves adds. Website structure refers to how the different pages of a website are interlinked and presented. Join our international team of Playmakers working to make business analytics easier for everyone. API Documentation How to connect your tools and data to Databox. The site will pull data from a website to display it for a user.

Usability testing allows you to make sure the designed structure works for your users. During usability testing, participants are required to interact with your product in a typical way, like they would’ve done in real life. Obviously, they can’t find the answers as the content is not ready yet, but they can still indicate their course of action while interacting with your future product. Sometimes navigation can be present in the form of an interactive guide, tour, or tutorial.

Functional Hierarchy Diagram

At this point, it may be helpful to create a mindmap to establish a hierarchy among each page. A simple sketch can help you visualize how content will be connected. This can become a rough draft of your site map and should look like a flow chart.

This may explain why this last single review page gets more than 3,000 organic traffic, according toAhrefs(that’s a lot!), even though it only has 5 external referring domains. And when you click on one of these links, you land on a detailed review of the product. As you scroll through this article, it has a classic comparison table that links you to individual reviews.

Information Architecture

However, building a site with this model requires a lot of attention. So you need to think from the bottom up and tag the metadata of your content based on the principles of architecture principles. If done correctly, the database model structures a website that visitors can create their own experiences. This structure model is nontraditional, but in the early years of the internet, they were pretty popular.

Removing this step makes site structures flow much better and gives search engines fewer competing pages,” Thompson adds. How a website is structured impacts the usability of the site. To rank well on search engine results pages and keep users engaged, a website must be intuitive and easy to navigate. User interface elements such as copy, CTAs, links, buttons, and menus signal to users that these pages are connected.

In order to create a good site structure, it is necessary to balance between the “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches. Use a keyword tool like Ubersuggest to choose the right terms. It offers extensive keyword data, insights to improve traffic and backlinks opportunities.

Well, a website that has no issues whatsoever is probably impossible to create, but you can try to make your site as good as possible. Consider a news site as an example – the content is located in a chronological order. As a rule, most users visit such portals to find out the latest news.

Site Structure: The Ultimate Guide

There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a conversion-ready customer due to poorly organized website architecture. If you thought finding one polo shirt was hard, imagine being tasked with creating a map of the entire website. Yet, you need to extract context from hundreds of thousands of web pages to determine if this is a fashion blog, a photography site or an ecommerce store. Have you ever walked into the clearance section of a large department store the week after Christmas? There are piles of clothes everywhere; tags are missing; sizes are jumbled up; departments are mashed together.

If you have wireframes, you can incorporate them into your sitemap to create a wireframe map. This demonstrates how visual navigation elements can help users move between web pages. This is particularly valuable for eCommerce sites because users are able to explore many pages and find new products. It’s particularly valuable for browsing and can make it more likely for users to buy additional products. The main page and subpages are all interlinked, so users are able to choose which page they want to visit next.

In contrast, the “our difference” option makes heavier use of images to form a stronger emotional connection with visitors. The Shade Room makes use of two styles of navigation menus as well. At the top of the page, you see a standard horizontal header. Notice that this header contains a hamburger button to the right. If you click on this button, a secondary navigation interface appears to the right. This acts like a lightbox popup, blocking some of the content and dimming the rest of the background, and contains more navigation links that you can use to browse the site.

To do this, you will need to plan everything you want to do with your website beforehand. Planning its structure is by far one of the most fundamental tasks you should start from. Hence, here’s the complete guide on how to plan a website structure. The balance between “width” and “depth” makes the content easily accessible.

Even if your website has a million pages, the architecture should allow users to start from the homepage and end up on any page within three to four clicks. You simply have to connect them to website structure each other and to their parent pages with internal links. Users don’t want to waste time trying to find information on your site. So practice empathy and provide an intuitive web experience.

It can make sense for websites with a limited number of pages, all naturally connected to each other. Bear in mind that you’ll have a few elements common to most pages — such as the navigation menu, and the footer content. If your site is for a business, for example, it’s a good idea to have your contact information available in the footer on each page. Related tags Tags can also be used in e-commerce websites to group products according to brand and direct users to similar products. Main navigation/menu If your site has some subcategories that are useful for users such as their account information, you can create a secondary vertical menu like the one the Asos has.