When you link to pages within your site, those internal links convey context through page relevance, link intent, anchor text and even the copy surrounding the link. Internal links also pass important link equity, or PageRank, to key lead generating landing pages throughout your site. One of your top user interface design goals should be to help users find exactly what they want as quickly as possible.

There are two useful tools that offer an easy-to-understand indication of how close or off-track you are to creating a user-friendly website; heatmaps and behaviour flow. Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs Keyword Explorer are excellent tools to aid keyword research. Conducting a competitive analysis is also useful to determine what keywords your competition uses, and helps plan your keyword selection. A lengthy loading time also affects how search engine spiders read your website. On the contrary, when a website is fast, Google can crawl multiple pages at the same time. The home page is at the top, underneath which are category pages that can be further broken into different sub-categories.

How To Create a Website Architecture Plan

In contrast to that, the architecture of a website is more in the background. In fact, getting the structure right is one of the most fundamental parts of running a website. Users will easily be able to navigate through your website and discover what they need hassle-free. On such websites, finding what you need by browsing through the different pages is quite improbable. Now imagine if Derek’s paintings were organized in a bunch of different piles – the most beautiful ones in one pile, those of cars in another, those of superheroes in yet another.

With no other options or clickable buttons you have to go all the way back to the home page and start the process all over again. Keep in mind that the best choice for your selected structure should take into account a lot of detailed information before choosing. You should consider business goals, content audit results and some trial and error.

Main Types of Website Structures

There are several ways of showing breadcrumbs on your WordPress site, including plugins and themes. Of course, if that’s more your thing, you can also create a website structure diagram using pen and paper. Lots of people are interested to learn more about who is behind your website, so don’t skimp on this opportunity to help them connect with humans instead of a faceless web entity. Top-down – Starts with more general pages and breaks up into more specific taxonomies as you dive deeper.

For blogs, you should write extensively on the topics you want to rank for. You should write some main articles — yourcornerstone articles — and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from how to plan a website structure these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll ensure that your most important pages have both the most and most relevant links.

Helps Generate Sitelinks

Users’ explanations on why they did what they did will help you understand your customers better and improve your product. However, it’s imperative to test your information architecture https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ as soon as the prototype is ready and before it gets to the development team. This practice can help you avoid costly mistakes like having to rebuild your product.

• Without question, your website structure plays a critical role in retaining users and boosting conversions.
• Imagine that a user types in a question to the search engine, and your article pops up.
• In any case, do not forget about manual rework because none of the tools will give a 100% result.
• The most common website architecture is some type of hierarchical structure.

But infinite scroll may work well for a blog or content that’s not product-based. Neither visitors nor crawlers would understand or appreciate it. The URL structure must align with both navigation and breadcrumbs for consistency. Your website’s navigation format, clickable elements, and design should all follow a consistent theme.

Website Architecture: 9 Simple Strategies to Improve Your Site Structure

You should carefully plan your website’s structure to make it easier for users to navigate to products, services, and important information. “Internal linking is an integral part of site structure best practices as it is the stepping stone between pages for both users and search engines. Page navigational elements, when done right, can support your website’s information flow, helping search engines and users to better understand your pages. Here are a few best practices to get your site navigation right. These menus expand into organized lists of pages so the user can quickly find the product category they’re looking for.

For example, as an online shop, merely having a product category named “pants” is probably not going to be too helpful. You should at least divide it into “women’s pants” and “men’s pants”, and likely even further into “jeans”, “shorts”, etc. Diagrams.net – A comfortable tool that looks a lot like Google Docs. You can easily add shapes and arrows, create flowcharts, annotate your elements, and export your work in different formats.

Create a Top Navigation Menu

Before you go, we would love to get additional information to help us better understand how we can serve you best. As always, you need to know your target audience’s goals and design your header accordingly. For example, a small house-cleaning agency might not need search functionality to be part of their header, but a large eCommerce store might. Get weekly updates on the newest stories, posts and case studies right in your mailbox. Use a notepad or web tools to draw the hierarchy of the pages and the connections between them.

These elements are listed in a content template with their characteristics included. Once you know what a user wants, you can update the content of an existing website and list it. The main activities to perform at this stage are content inventory and content audit. At the end of this stage, you’ll end up with a user profile and user flow that illustrate the way a user thinks and interacts with a product.

Conduct Keyword Research

When working on navigation, remember that no matter which pages the visitors come from, they must be able to easily locate what they are looking for. The terms IA and navigation are sometimes used interchangeably. However, they are not the same since navigation is just a part of IA. The point of the activity is to see directly how users perceive the product’s content pieces. Card sorting is usually conducted in small groups of participants, where they have to describe and sort cards with pieces of information into different classes. The cards contain topics that must be categorized, or pieces of content that must be described.