Website architecture is the foundation for your website content. It will determine how customers interact with your website and move from the homepage to products to checkout.
What is web architecture?
Website architecture refers to how the pages on your site are connected and the hierarchy of those pages.
When it comes to web architecture, there are a few questions to ask yourself.
1. Is your URL structure user-friendly?
2. How many clicks does it take to get from the homepage to an important page?
3. How does your search box work?
Why is good web architecture important?
A good information architecture can improve not only user experience but search engine rankings too.
Helpful for search engines
Without a good architecture, Google may struggle to understand your website and the purpose of each page, meaning it won’t know when to show your website in the search results.
Helpful for customers
If customers can’t easily find the information they’re looking for, they’ll leave and go somewhere else. Good navigation guides the user from wherever they land on the site to where they want to be, to the checkout, increasing conversion and customer retention.
What to consider for a good website architecture
Easy-to-follow navigation
There is no one-size-fits-all navigation menu. Keep it as easy to navigate as possible to suit your website so customers can find important pages quickly.
Breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb menu is a navigation aid that helps customers understand where they are on a website and allows them to trace their way back through the categories. Breadcrumbs encourage browsing and reduce bounce rates, giving plenty of SEO benefits.
Descriptive URLs
URLs that describe the page content can improve click-through rate as the customer will know what to expect when they click on that link.
Internal linking
Internal links make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for to increase conversions. It also helps search engines understand your website structure for a better chance to improve rankings.
Orphan pages
Orphan pages are pages that have no links pointing towards them. This makes it more difficult for search engines to find these pages, meaning they often don’t get indexed or appear in the search results.
Infinite scroll or pagination?
Infinite scroll can reduce the number of clicks a customer takes to find the product they’re looking for. But pagination gives the user greater control and helps them remember where the products are if they want to find them again.
Sitemaps
A sitemap lists all your crawlable pages and shows the structure in a readable format. An HTML sitemap allows customers struggling to find the page they’re after. An XML sitemap is for search engines to help them crawl your site easier.
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