What is "Website Hierarchy"?
While it might sound complicated, website hierarchy is simply another way of talking about the structure of your website and how the various categories and pages of your site work together to group content or products so that users and search engines can find what they're looking for. While they might go by different names, there are really 3 main hierarchy models that you can use:
- A flat structure
- A tiered structure
- Or a hybrid of the two
There's really no right or wrong website structure to use but what is critical, is using the same structure consistently throughout your website. If you keep changing your structure, not only will it make internal linking a real mess, but you could end up with hundreds, if not thousands of redirects and possibly some redirect loops (where users get redirected between two or more pages which redirect to each other).
Why Does Website Hierarchy Matter?
Website hierarchies matter because it affects how easy it is for users to find the information they're looking for in your website and easy access to the content of your website will also affect how easily search engines can find your content too. A complicated website struture with lots of pages in illogical locations will make it difficult to find information, possibly leading users to leave your website without finding what they're looking for and if you're selling online, that means lost sales and revenue.
Getting website structure right affects your bottom line.
Should You Change Your Website Structure?
Never say never. If after reading this you review your website from the perspective of a customer and decide that it's overly complex with lots of detail hidden away, it could be wise to update your website structure to use a more straight forward set of categories. For example if you have lots of categories but not much content or product in each, it could be worth consolidating everything into a more broad category so people can see everything more easily.
Just remember though, that if you decide to move any content or categories, you need to plan your new structure carefully thinking about what the user needs. You also need to prepare some redirects too, so that anyone (or thing) trying to access an old page, is automatically sent to the new page.
Which Website Structure is Best?
The really is no right or wrong answer when it comes to website structure, you need to think about your circumstances and what your customers need. You can use tools like Google Analytics to understand which areas of your site people are (and aren't) visiting and help you decide if you need to make changes.
Typically, large e-commerce sites have a very flat structure, with products hosted just off the homepage for example "domain.com/awesome-product" with a shallow category structure. Content websites will typically use a more detailed structure to divide their content into logical subject areas to help search engines understand topics, for example "domain.com/master-topic/topic/sub-topic" and websites which have product but don't sell sirect to consumers typically use a mix of the two.
It's important to review your traffic data regularly and understand if you need to try something different.
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