Website structure: how to proceed in 6 steps

Your website ranking is the same, and you don’t know why.

Do you ever think about your website structure? 🤯

A dysfunctional structure might damage your SEO, scare users off, and loose Google in an endless labyrinth.

Discover our tips to structure your website correctly.

What a website structure is for?

You might wonder about the true interest of structuring your website, except for your personal organization. In reality, a website structure is one of the key elements of SEO, user experience, and visibility.

Make Google’s job easier

Google’s crawlers analyse your website to rank in its result pages correctly. Thanks to a well-structured and organized website, they will get their bearings more easily. Google analyses thousands of websites each day to understand their subject and relate them to the most relevant requests of internet users.

A clear and logical structure enables your website to rank on the first pages of Google.

However, it isn’t the only impact of a good structure on SEO.

Boost user experience

A well-structured website enables to enjoy a user-friendly browsing experience. If users find the information they need quickly, search engines will consider your website as serious and reliable, and it deserves to rank high.

Reduce bounce rate

The reduction of your bounce rate is a direct result of an enhanced user experience. It’s the peeve of all web content creators who optimize their pages to enjoy higher visibility thanks to the algorithm.

A well-structured website prevents users from leaving your page immediately, and looking for another information source with a better structure. Therefore, the bounce rate is reduced and Google knows that you have a quality website.

To sum up, there are only good reasons to structure your website. However, if you are a beginner web creator, or if you realize that you need to redesign your website, this task might be time-consuming.

To get a clear idea and fulfil this time-consuming and important step, here is our 6-step method.

6 steps for a good website structure

Step 1: Define your structure beforehand

To make effective work on your website, define your structure beforehand. It represents half of the work. If you have already created your website, you have 2 options:

• Redesign your website structure totally

• Optimize the current one

The first option might be interesting, to enhance your website.

For a good preparation of your website structure, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What is your type of website?

You don’t structure a portfolio like a blog. Just define your type of website to know the categories and main pages to highlight. A portfolio is for highlighting your CV and works. On the contrary, on a blog, you will showcase its topic and the latest articles.

• Who is your target audience?

Your target audience is related to your type of website. A portfolio is for professionals and potential recruiters, contrary to a blog, which is for fans and amateurs of a specific subject. They don’t look for the same information, and users’ path will be different.

Here is the example of a blog: it’s possible that internet users arrive at your website by clicking on an article instead of a homepage. Therefore, you will need to think about structuring all your articles so that they redirect them into the main pages of your website.

• Which needs does it meet?

Your website meets a user’s need (need for information, product, entertainment…).

Once again, these specific needs help your website structure to grab internet users’ attention to this need you have met, and that encourages them to come back.

• What is its point of difference?

Such as for each web design step, you must determine your axis of differentiation of the same sector. If you have an online store, it might be the presentation of products or the detail of your compositions. If you have a portfolio, it might be your animations embedded with computer code… To sum up, your website stands out from others. Highlight it in your structure!

Step 2: Gather all your contents

Once you have determined the elements you want to showcase on your website, you must gather all its future contents (homepage, contact page, articles, product pages, login pages, presentation page…).

To get a clear idea, you can gather your contents on an Excel sheet or several scraps of paper to classify them to the 3rd step.

Don’t hesitate to spend time on the creation of categories to deal with all your website contents and anticipate its evolution.

It’ll be always possible to modify your structure to add a new page to your menu. However, if you plan to add a new category in the near future, you can think about it right now.

Step 3: Create categories

It’s the essential step of your website structure. It’s time to design your structure.

To that end, just follow these steps:

• Determine the main pages of your website

It will depend on the type of websites and its objectives. Despite everything, you must display home pages and contact pages. Then, you can add blog pages and present your works, store, manifest, project…

• Define the secondary pages

They’ll be under the main pages. For example, the article pages will be under the general page called “Blog”, etc. If you deal with several topics, you can create a main page called “Lifestyle” where you can add subpages such as “Culture”, “Cooking”, “Travels”…

It’s better to draw your website structure to get a clear idea of it.

• Encourage others to participate

To have a relevant structure, you can request an opinion from your family and friends. When you use all the contents you want to display on your website, ask them for classifying the main and secondary pages. Results will surprise you!

Step 4: Structure the interior of your pages

Let’s continue with the structuration of your website.

A website structure is like a funnel and goes from general to specific. Once you have structured your website and its pages, you can work on its internal structure.

A website has several levels. First, you have the main title of your page (H1). Then, for a blog article for example, you will often find a summary. It’s useful to enable your visitors to read your content more easily.

After the first large part of your article, you might have an introduction, the first step of a tutorial… For example, in this article, the titles “What a website structure is for?” and “6 steps for a good website structure” correspond to an H2 tag.

Finally, the large parts of your article are divided into subparts (for example, the different steps of our method). They correspond to an H3 tag that represent subtitles.

Moreover, your page might have important boxes, texts in bold (strong tags), photos… Use different elements to structure your website and make it user-friendly.

Step 5: Work on your internal linking

Here is the final step of your website structure: your internal linking. You have already linked your main pages with your secondary pages, as your secondary pages are available from your main pages.

However, would you like to link your secondary pages so that users enjoy different browsing possibilities?

This is possible thanks to internal linking. You just need to link your different secondary pages between them. Here is an example: If you talk about a topic you have already talked about in another article, you can add a link to the previous article.

You can also add links to pages of another categories (contact page, home page…).

Step 6: Optimize your structure

Made it! You have a well-designed and useful website structure!

Now, here are several tips to help you optimize your structure even more:

• Limit the number of clicks between your different pages for users

• Add little information to each page

• Enable users to back to your homepage easily

• Make your Contact page easy to access

• Use your footer to add browsing links

• Keep a sitemap.xml file up-to-date to have your eye on all the elements and structure of your website…

This method will enable you to create your website structure easily, especially if you use our website builder, SiteW.