A multicultural team brainstorming and collaborating during a business meeting.

8 October 2026

Planning your website structure before design starts

“Can we see some designs first?” Fair question. It nearly always comes too early. Before anybody picks a colour or a font, someone has to decide what pages the site will have, how they hang together and how a visitor gets from the home page to the thing they came for. That’s your website structure. Get it roughly right on paper and the design, the build and the SEO all get easier. Skip it and you’ll end up paying a designer to redraw the menus three weeks in.

In brief

Structure is just the list of pages, how they’re grouped and how they link together. It gets planned before design.
Build it from the questions customers ask you. Your org chart is the wrong starting point.
Anything people search for by name probably needs its own page, with a plain, readable address.
Replacing an old site? Plan the new structure and the redirects side by side.

What structure actually means

You’ll hear it called site structure, information architecture or simply ‘the sitemap’. It’s a list of every page the site will have, sorted into groups, showing which pages sit under which. For most businesses it fits on one sheet of paper or a short spreadsheet.

Our guide to planning a business website gives structure a few paragraphs as one step among many.

Why sort it before design? Because nearly everything else hangs off it. The menu comes from it. So do the page templates a designer has to draw, the URLs, the breadcrumbs and most of the links between pages. Change the structure halfway through a project and every one of those changes with it. That’s where budgets quietly leak.

Start with your customers’ questions

The weakest structures copy the way a business is organised internally. Departments. Product codes. The name the founder gave a service back in 2009. Customers don’t think like that.

Start somewhere else. Write down the questions people ask you on the phone, by email and face to face, then group them. A building contractor might find nearly every question is about the kind of work they take on, or how a job runs from first survey to handover. Price comes up constantly as well. Each pile becomes a section, and the bigger questions inside it become pages. Extensions, loft conversions and new builds each get a page under the services section. Then a page on how a project runs, and one on costs.

An online shop goes through the same exercise with its categories. Shoppers look for ‘women’s walking boots’. They don’t look for whatever the stock system calls that range. Your warehouse labels and your website categories can be different, and quite often they should be.

If you’ve already written a website brief that sets out your audience and goals, half this work is done.

Give the important things their own page

Plenty of small business sites have one services page listing eleven things in bullet points. Somebody searching for one of those eleven things never lands on a page that’s actually about it.

If a customer would search for it by name, or ring you about it on its own, it probably deserves its own page. An accountancy practice offering bookkeeping, payroll, tax returns and company formation has four different buyers there, each with different worries. One page can’t talk to all of them properly.

Don’t swing the other way and create pages for the sake of it. Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as pages made to rank for similar searches that lead people to in-between pages less useful than where they actually want to go, and they name pages aimed at particular regions or cities that all funnel users to one page as an example. Twenty near-identical town pages for the same service fits that description uncomfortably well. A location page earns its place when there’s something real to say about that place.

Deciding which page targets which search is known as keyword mapping, and it’s far easier to do now, while everything’s still a spreadsheet. Each page gets one main job. If two pages end up chasing the same job, one of them probably shouldn’t exist.

Keep it shallow and keep the menu short

Most business sites we see need two levels. Sometimes three. Home, then the sections, then the pages inside them. Bury a key page five clicks down and fewer people will ever reach it.

The main menu wants to be short. A charity might manage with what we do, get involved, donate, about us and contact. Everything else can live inside those sections or down in the footer. Fourteen top-level items look thorough on a planning sheet. On a phone they turn into a long scrolling list that nobody reads.

Keep the navigation in the same place and the same order on every page. The ordering part has an accessibility angle too. WCAG 2.2 covers it at Level AA in success criterion 3.2.3, Consistent Navigation. Menus that repeat across pages should turn up in the same relative order each time, unless the user changes them. A second AA criterion, 2.4.5 Multiple Ways, wants more than one route to each page, for example links to related pages alongside a search box or a sitemap page. Steps in a process, like a checkout, are exempt.

URLs, breadcrumbs and links all follow the plan

Once the groups are settled, the page addresses more or less write themselves. Google’s URL guidance recommends a simple structure, readable words in place of long ID numbers, and hyphens between words. So a roofer’s flat roofing page might sit at /services/flat-roofing/, which tells a person what’s coming before the page even loads.

Breadcrumbs are the small trail of links near the top of a page, running from Home to Services to Flat roofing. They show where a page sits in the site’s hierarchy. Google’s breadcrumb markup guidance suggests they follow the route a typical visitor takes to reach the page, which won’t always match the URL exactly. The markup itself is only a small bit of code, and our piece on what schema markup does for a business website explains which types are worth the bother.

Then there are the links in your body copy. Google mainly finds pages by following links from pages it has already crawled, and its link guidance says every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site. Every page on your sheet should have at least one arrow pointing at it. Our article on how internal links help people and Google find your pages goes into choosing those links and the wording.

So where does an XML sitemap fit? It’s handy, and it still won’t do the structure’s job. Google says that if a site’s pages are properly linked it can usually discover most of them. A small, well-linked site (about 500 pages or fewer that you want in search) might not need a sitemap at all. Sitemaps earn their keep on bigger or more complicated sites. Brand-new sites with few links pointing at them benefit too, as do sites heavy on video or images.

Redesigning? Your old structure still counts

If there’s an existing site, don’t start from a blank sheet. Pull a list of every current page first and see which ones bring in visits and enquiries. Your new structure needs a home for each of them, or at least a sensible place to redirect them to.

That’s why structure and redirects get planned together. Every old address that changes needs mapping to its new one before launch day, and our piece on moving to a new website without losing your Google rankings walks through that part step by step. Google’s starter guide is fairly relaxed on one point, though. It says there’s no rush to reorganise an existing site. That can help in the long run, especially on bigger sites, but search engines will probably understand your pages as they are. So don’t change URLs just because the new ones look tidier. Change them when the structure itself needs to change.

A simple way to do it this week

Jot down twenty or thirty questions customers really ask you.
Sort them into four to seven piles and name each pile in your customers’ words.
Decide which questions need a page of their own.
Sketch the main menu from the pile names and keep it short.
Give each page a plain URL and one main search it’s meant to answer.
Check every page has at least one sensible link pointing at it.

Then hand it to your designer. When it’s time to fill the pages, our article on designing service pages that turn visitors into enquiries covers what each one needs.

Getting the foundations right

Mapping out structure is one of the first things we do on any website design project, long before anyone looks at visuals. Got a sitemap sketched out and want a second pair of eyes on it? Or not sure where to begin? Talk to us and we’ll have a look at what you’ve got.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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