Everyone thinks site architecture is very technical and hard to understand, but it’s the most straight-forward. All site architecture means is the structure of a website. It’s characterized by how the web pages fit together, the order of which web pages connect to other pages, and the URL path links that visitors can follow.
On the outside, site architecture regulates a user’s experience operating between pages on a website. On the other hand, the importance of site architecture impacts how accurately a search engine can find and analyze its pages. A straight forward site architecture is ideal because search engines can quickly decide if the website is trustworthy and can rank high in search results. If a search engine experiences difficulty navigating through a website or finds out its architecture is complicated, the website lowers its changes of appearing on search engine result pages.
When a website is being designed, the initial phase is to create a sitemap that outlines the foundation of the site architecture. When it comes to site architecture, all websites should be created to be user-friendly in mind, so users can find what they’re looking for with nominal clicks, and search engines can easily analyze and index web pages.
4 Steps to Create a Clean, Functional Website Architecture
- Determine the main purpose of the website. The main purpose is important as it will serve as the reference points when Google analyzes which pages are the most important and are easily accessible from any webpage.
- File each webpage based on the type of information it displays.
- Each page hierarchy should outline the main categories and split into subgroups.
- Create a navigation bar that is visible on every page of the website. The navigation bar should have active links to each webpage which makes it easier to access subpages.