Most websites are planned in the wrong order: first a design, then a platform, and finally an attempt to fill the templates with content. The result is pages that look finished but don’t answer what visitors came for.
This is the order we work in ourselves: goals, pages, structure, content, and only then technology. The plan also tells you what the platform has to be able to do, so it’s the best basis for your choice of platform.
What should the site achieve?
Start with one sentence about what you most want a visitor to do: buy, call, book a meeting or sign up. Most sites have several goals, but one of them is the most important, and the structure should point toward it. Then write down who comes, and what they want to know before they do it. Don’t guess. The questions are in your emails, in what customers ask on the phone and in the store, and in the search terms your current site is already found for in Google Search Console.
Find the pages you need
With the questions in front of you, you can group them. Questions that belong together become one page: everything about delivery and returns, everything about a particular service, everything about who you are. Each page gets one job and one topic. That makes it easier to write, easier to find your way around, and easier for Google to understand.
Watch out for two mistakes. One is pages that overlap: three nearly identical pages about the same service compete with each other in search results, and none of them becomes good. Merge them into one. The other is pages that exist because other sites have them. A page about “our values” only makes sense if someone asks, and a home page that tries to say everything says nothing. Better to write fewer pages that each answer properly.
For an online store, the most important pages are the categories. Think of them in terms of how customers search, not how your stock is organized: a customer looks for “rain jackets for kids”, not the supplier’s product group.
Draw a sitemap
Once you know the pages, put them in a tree. It doesn’t have to be pretty. A text document is fine:
Home
├── Rainwear
│ ├── Rain jackets
│ └── Rain pants
├── Boots
├── Guides
│ └── How to choose the right size
├── About us
├── Delivery and returns
└── ContactThe tree shows straight away whether the structure is too deep. A customer should be able to reach the important pages in a few clicks from the home page, and anything hidden four levels down is rarely found. The top level usually becomes the main menu, so keep it short. Pages like delivery, terms and conditions and the privacy policy belong in the footer.
Decide the URLs while you draw the tree. They should be short, readable and in the site’s language, for example /rainwear/rain-jackets/, without dates or ID numbers, and they should last. Every time a URL changes, you lose a little of the place it had in search results, and links from other sites point to the wrong place unless you set up a redirect.
The menu is only one way of getting around. Breadcrumbs at the top of the page (Home › Rainwear › Rain jackets) show where you are and make it easy to go up a level. Links in the text itself tie the pages together: a guide about sizes links to the categories it’s about, and the category page links back to the guide. Those links help both visitors and search engines see which pages belong together, and which are most important.
The content, page by page
For each page in the tree: what does the visitor want to know, and what should they do next? The pages have different jobs:
| Page | What the visitor wants to know | What the page leads to |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Am I in the right place, and where should I go? | The most important categories or services |
| Category or service | Do you have what I’m looking for, and what sets it apart? | A product or an enquiry |
| Product page | Price, dimensions, delivery, and is it right for me? | Add to cart |
| Guide | The answer to a specific question | The category or service the guide is about |
| About us | Who’s behind it, and can I trust them? | Contact or services |
| Contact | How and when can I reach you? | An email, a call or a form |
Write the copy before the design is finished, or at least before it’s locked. A design drawn with placeholder text always looks good, but the real text is rarely as long as the placeholder, and a product description or a price list can need a completely different layout from the one that was drawn.
The technical structure
Only now is it time for the technology, and the plan answers most of the questions. Pages that rarely change, like about us and services, can be built as fixed pages. Pages that need to grow, like products, categories and guides, should be built as templates filled from a database, so a new product or article doesn’t need a new page built by hand. The difference, and when one is better than the other, is covered in the guide to dynamic and static sites.
In an online store, you also need to separate categories from filters. Categories are the few fixed entry points customers look for, and they should have their own pages with text. Color, size and brand are attributes the customer filters on inside a category. If you make every combination into a page, you end up with thousands of thin pages that search engines have to spend time on for no reason.
After the launch
The structure is a guess until the site is in use. Follow in Search Console which pages are found, and for which searches, and see in your analytics where visitors leave the site. When new questions come in from customers, find the page they belong on, or create a new one. And if you change a URL, always set up a redirect from the old one.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages should my website have?
As many as your visitors’ questions require, and no more. A small business can manage with a handful of pages. An online store has as many categories as customers need to find the products.
Is a sitemap the same as sitemap.xml?
No. The sitemap here is your plan for the structure. sitemap.xml is a file that Rank Math or WordPress itself, for example, creates automatically, and that tells search engines which pages exist. One is for you, the other for Google.
Should I write the copy myself?
You know your customers and your products best, so at a minimum you should supply the content: facts, answers and examples. A copywriter can make it sharper, but can’t invent what you know.
Want help?
We plan and build websites and online stores, from the structure to the finished site. Read more about our work with WordPress and WooCommerce.