How to Design User-Friendly Website Architecture

When most people think about website design, they think about the aesthetics — color schemes, images, layout, text size, and fonts. But there is so much more going on behind the scenes that contributes to good design. Website content architecture — or how a site’s pages are structured and linked together — can make a big impact on your site’s user experience, accessibility, and search ranking. 

Imagine you’re trying to locate a doctor’s office for your first appointment. What are the landmarks or navigation features you’d use to quickly find what you’re looking for? In a perfect world, the building would be properly labeled for reference from the street, parking spots marked for visitors, and all offices would be properly named. All this guidance would help you to find the office quickly and easily. 

Your website’s user journey is much like the above scenario. Can first-time visitors to your site find what they are looking for? Are there clearly marked steps to help them complete tasks, such as subscribing to services, making a purchase, or filling out forms? What about individuals with disabilities who rely on assistive technology, such as a screen reader — can they navigate your site?

To help you answer these questions and improve your site’s accessibility and user experience, we put together this quick guide on website architecture.

What are we talking about when we say “website architecture,” and why is it important? Website architecture, in its basic form, is how a site’s pages are structured and linked together to ensure that end-users and search engine crawlers can effectively navigate to the information they are looking for. 

While you may be thinking that the navigation design of your website is clear and the path is easily accessible, if you have pages that are several clicks away from your home page, it’s possible that without proper linking, users may get lost along the way. Any ambiguity throughout the journey will ultimately lead to frustration and higher bounce rates. Your site visitors will look for information elsewhere, including your competitors’ sites.

Let’s think back to the hypothetical office visit. Imagine you’ve identified that your destination is on the third floor, and that’s the only information you know. Do you turn left or right once on that floor? Is there any other information you may need to efficiently get where you’re going? The same thought process applies to website architecture design. 

Proper website architecture also indirectly enhances search engine optimization (SEO). In general, the fewer clicks it takes for users to reach any page on your site, the better. Googlebot and other spiders also rely on site architecture SEO elements to find and index all your pages and rank your site in search results.

Day one of planning your accessible website architecture should include establishing your site hierarchy. As you add more pages, stick to that hierarchy. 

An easy way to organize your site’s architecture is with category pages. If you’d like to add a new page to your website, make sure it easily fits under an existing category — if it doesn’t, create a new category. Without proper buckets for new pages, there is a tendency for them to get missed by both users and SEO crawlers. 

he website menu, which reflects a website’s structure, plays a key role in site navigation and accessibility. Use semantic markup to make your menu accessible to users, search engines, and assistive technologies. 

Semantic markup, as its name suggests, describes the meaning and type of each element, making it easy for users and machines to understand and adapt content. For example, when coded semantically, menus can easily adapt to increased or decreased fonts, mobile views, and assistive technologies. 

There is some wiggle room when it comes to designing website menus. Depending on the end goal, you can choose between ordered and unordered lists. 

• This is an unordered list item. 
• This is also an unordered list item. 

1. This is an ordered list item. 
2. This is also an ordered list item.

This structural information allows screen readers to announce the number of menu items and provide corresponding navigation functionality. 

If you have a complex navigation with many subcategories, consider using a mega menu design. Typically displayed in a two-dimensional dropdown layout, this is the easiest and most comprehensive way to display the many choices and reveal lower-level site pages at first glance (as mega menus tend to contain both first-level and second-level categories).

When you code your website menu with correct semantic markup, any responsive elements and features will apply to the mobile menu. Designing your website menu with mobile responsiveness will allow for the site page navigation to be dynamically expanded or retracted as part of the automatic responsive design layout. 

Your website architecture heavily relies on how you link your pages together. It’s recommended to use internal linking to connect your website’s content to other pages on your site. 

It’s also important to ensure that your navigation links are coded in HTML — not JavaScript or Flash. Google can only partially crawl and index JavaScript. Using HTML is a wise navigation design technique for increased usability and SEO.