A visitor lands on an e-commerce site to buy a USB-C adapter. They click “Products,” then “Accessories,” then “Connectivity,” then “Cables and Adapters.” Four levels deep, four clicks—and half of all users will have given up before reaching the product page. The problem isn’t the content; it’s how it’s organized. Structuring a website so visitors can find any information in seconds comes down to practical, testable choices that are often overlooked.
Internal search and support tickets: signs of poor navigation
Before redesigning a menu, save time by looking at what visitors are already searching for. Queries entered into a site’s internal search bar offer a free diagnostic. When someone searches for “pricing” even though “Our Plans” appears in the main menu, the problem is the label, not missing content.
Customer support requests work the same way. A ticket asking “where can I find my invoice?” suggests that the link to the customer account area is poorly placed or labeled. Searches with no results and “where can I find” tickets reveal pages that are poorly named or buried too deep.
For a brochure website with a few dozen pages, such as the La Maison De Daniel sitemap, a complete list of URLs gives you an immediate overview of the site structure and helps you spot orphan pages or ambiguous labels.
Card sorting and tree testing: test menu labels before design
It’s easy to assume a site’s organization is obvious because you know your own catalog. Visitors, however, don’t share your internal logic. Two methods can help you check whether the structure works before you touch the code.
Card sorting to group content
The idea is simple: list the site’s pages on virtual cards and ask a panel of users to group them into categories. The results show how visitors naturally associate topics. A restaurant might discover that its customers group “Wine List” with “Reservations” rather than “Our Food.”
Tree testing to check findability
Once the site structure is in place, tree testing gives users a specific task (“find the after-sales service contact page”) and measures whether they can get there without taking a detour. Success rate alone isn’t enough: you also need to see whether users take a direct path. Someone who finds the right page after going back and forth through the menu three times has technically “succeeded,” but the site structure is still a problem.
Both tests can be run with online tools, without a visual mockup—just a text-based tree. You’re testing the logic of the organization, not the look of the menu.
Flat structure and categories: reduce navigation depth
A site’s depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach any page from the homepage. The higher the number, the greater the risk of visitors giving up—and the harder it is for search engine crawlers to discover all the URLs.
A so-called “flat” architecture limits depth to a maximum of two or three levels. In practice, that means every page on the site can be reached within three clicks from the homepage. To achieve this, focus on your categories.
A category groups pages that serve the same search intent or user need. Here are some criteria for deciding whether a category belongs in the menu:
- It contains at least three subpages. If it has fewer, it’s usually better to place those pages under a neighboring category.
- Its label matches a word or phrase users actually enter into Google (check this in Search Console or a keyword research tool).
- It doesn’t duplicate another category. If “Practical Guides” and “Tips” contain the same type of content, combine them.
The trap of nested subcategories
Adding a fourth navigation level may seem logical as your catalog grows. In practice, it buries deeper pages. Search engines give them less weight, and visitors rarely find them. When a subcategory grows beyond around 20 pages, promote it to a top-level category rather than adding another level.
Internal linking and contextual links: connect pages
The site structure handles vertical navigation (from a category to a page). Internal linking handles cross-navigation (from one page to another related page). The two work together.
An article about hardwood floor care should link to the product page for finishing oils. A hiking boot product page would benefit from linking to a guide to choosing boots by terrain. Placed in the body of the text, these contextual links serve three purposes:
- They keep visitors on the site by offering a natural next step in their reading, which reduces the bounce rate.
- They pass SEO value to the target pages, helping search engines understand which pages are most important.
- They make up for the limitations of the main menu, which can’t display every page on the site.
Link anchor text should describe the destination page, rather than use vague wording. “Hiking boot buying guide” works better than “click here” for both visitors and Google.
Navigation accessibility
The WCAG 2.2 standard, published by the W3C in October 2023, strengthens requirements for navigation elements. Minimum clickable target sizes and visible keyboard focus directly affect menus and internal links. A dropdown menu with items only a few millimeters high on mobile becomes unusable for some visitors, no matter how carefully the site structure is designed.
Organizing a website’s pages isn’t a theoretical exercise you do once when the site is built. Internal searches, user journeys, and support feedback provide ongoing clues about what works and what doesn’t. The best site structure is one you refine after observing how visitors actually navigate.
