Decide structure before looks
A new site is the cheapest time to get structure right. Moving pages, renaming URLs and rebuilding templates after launch is slow and can disrupt how search engines see the site. The aim of this article is narrow: how to plan a site so that it is easy for crawlers to move through and easy for a person to audit later. Visual styling is a separate job.
The practical test is simple. Could someone who has never seen the site describe how it is organized after looking at its menu and a handful of URLs? If so, search engines will usually find it easy too.
Start with a content inventory
Before choosing a platform or a template, list what the site needs to contain. For a small business this might be a home page, services, an about page, contact details and a set of helpful articles. For a larger site it could be thousands of products or posts.
Then group the items. Planning categories and topic groups is a design task in its own right: each group should have a clear subject, and each page should have one obvious home. If you find a page that could sit equally well in three places, either the grouping is unclear or the page is trying to do too much.
Build a shallow, logical hierarchy
A typical healthy structure looks like a tree:
- Home page
- Main sections (a handful, each with a clear name)
- Subsections or individual pages within each
Keep the tree as shallow as the content allows. Important pages should be reachable in a few clicks from the home page. Pages that sit deep in the tree tend to be discovered less often and linked to less, a problem discussed under click depth. That does not mean everything should hang off the home page; a flat structure with hundreds of links is as hard to use as a very deep one.
Name sections with words your visitors use. A label such as “Resources” tells nobody anything; “Guides” or “Price lists” is clearer.
Plan URLs as part of the design
URLs are visible, shared and hard to change later without redirects. Good practice is to make them readable and predictable:
- Use short, lowercase words separated by hyphens.
- Reflect the hierarchy where it makes sense (a section name followed by a page name).
- Avoid session IDs, dates that will go stale and long strings of parameters.
- Pick one form and stick with it: with or without a trailing slash, with or without “www”.
The article on writing a readable url structure goes into the details. The key planning decision here is consistency. Decide the rules once, write them down and apply them to every template.
If the site will have filters, sorting or search results that create many URL variations, plan how those will be handled from the start. Faceted pages and url parameters can multiply the number of addresses very quickly, and it is easier to control them in the design than to repair them afterward.
Design templates, not individual pages
Most sites are made of a small number of page types: home page, section page, article or product page, contact page, and so on. Design each type once as a template and reuse it. This brings several benefits:
- Consistent navigation, headings and footer on every page.
- Fixes applied once instead of hundreds of times.
- Easier audits, because checking a template covers every page that uses it.
For each template, decide in advance where the following will go: the page’s main heading, a short introduction, the main content, related links, and any call to action. Also define what fields editors must fill in, such as the title, a short description and an image description, so that none are forgotten.
Navigation and internal links by design
Menus are the main way crawlers and visitors discover sections. Use real links in plain HTML rather than relying only on scripts to build them, so that the destinations are visible without special processing. Include a footer for essential pages and add breadcrumb navigation on deeper pages so that each page shows its place in the hierarchy.
Beyond menus, plan how pages will link to each other in content. Internal linking is how related pages support each other, and a template can include a related-links area so that no page ends up as one of the orphan pages that nothing points to.
Clean markup
Clean markup means the underlying HTML describes the page honestly. A few principles are enough for most sites:
- One main heading per page, followed by subheadings in order. Good heading structure helps both screen readers and search engines understand the outline.
- Use proper elements for what they are: lists for lists, buttons for actions, links for navigation, tables only for tabular data.
- Give images meaningful descriptions where they carry information. Good alt text also helps people using assistive technology.
- Set a unique title and short description on every page, generated by the template where possible.
- Include a viewport setting so the page adapts to small screens.
- Avoid hiding important content behind clicks, tabs or scripts that crawlers may not trigger.
If you later add structured data, it works best when the underlying page is already well organized.
Build in the technical basics
Several technical items are easiest to plan at the start:
- Serve every page over a secure connection.
- Decide how duplicates will be handled, including which version of a page is the preferred one.
- Create an XML sitemap that is generated automatically and lists only pages you want found.
- Prepare a basic robots file that does not block anything important.
- Plan for a custom error page and sensible handling of removed pages.
- Choose a platform and theme that produce light pages, since speed is much harder to retrofit.
Make it easy to audit later
An audit goes faster when a site follows rules. Keep a short document that records the URL rules, the template list, the naming of sections and the required fields for editors. When a new person joins or an outside reviewer arrives, this document replaces guesswork. If the site later changes, noting what changed and when makes problems easier to trace.
A short planning checklist
- Content inventory completed and grouped.
- Hierarchy sketched, kept shallow, with clear section names.
- URL rules written down and applied consistently.
- Templates defined for each page type, with required fields.
- Menus built with real links; breadcrumbs on deeper pages.
- Headings, image descriptions, titles and descriptions handled by the template.
- Secure connection, sitemap, robots file and error page planned.
- A launch review scheduled to check all of the above on real pages.
Nothing here guarantees a particular search result. What it does is remove avoidable obstacles, so that the quality of the content and the experience can be judged on their merits.