How to plan a website's information architecture so visitors can find things

There is one principle for organizing a website's sections: group them by what visitors are looking for, not by the company's internal departments. Visitors don't care how many business units you have. They want to find products, pricing, case studies or contact details as quickly as possible.

In practice this takes three steps: list your main visitors and what they need to do, group the content into five to seven top-level sections, then check the result against two tests.

Step 1: List who visits and why

Divide your visitors into three to five groups and write one sentence for each: "They come to…". For example:

• Prospective clients: confirm what you do, how well you do it, and how to get in touch;
• Existing clients: find documents and the way to support;
• Partners and investors: learn about the company's background and news;
• Job seekers: read about the company and its openings.

Each task a visitor group needs to complete is an entry point the website must provide. Once the list is done, you often find that the sections most debated internally are rarely visited, while the contact details visitors actually need are buried in the footer.

Step 2: Group content into five to seven top-level sections

Write every existing and planned page on a card, then group the cards by what visitors would expect to find together. A few rules of thumb:

• Keep top-level sections to five to seven. More than that crowds the navigation, and visitors have to read a whole row before they can decide.
• Name sections in visitors' words. Use "Services", "Work" and "About", not internal project code names or department names. The words visitors type into search engines are the words your sections should use.
• For complex businesses, give the way in before the detail. A company with many business lines can place an entry panel on the homepage or under a top-level section, organized by business or by need, which then leads to the detail pages. When we built the website for Fashion Exchange, a fashion IP collaboration platform, the focus was on mapping clear entry points through a complex business.
• Put each page in one place only. When the same content appears under two sections, it is easy to update one and forget the other.

What goes on each screen of the homepage comes after the information architecture is settled; see What to put on your homepage.

Step 3: Check against two tests

Found within three clicks. Pick a few common visitor tasks, such as "find the description of a service" or "find the phone number", and count clicks from the homepage. If it takes more than three, adjust.

Every page has a next step. Case study pages lead to related services, service pages lead to case studies and contact details, articles lead to related articles. Visitors never hit a dead end after reading a page, and search engines and AI assistants can follow the links to understand the structure of the whole site, for reasons we covered in How to make your website easier for search engines and AI to cite.

Once settled: turn it into a sitemap

Information architecture should end up as a sitemap: the name, URL, section and parent–child relationships of every page. Design, development and content teams all work from this map, and when a new page is added later, you find its place on the map first. URLs follow the map too: pages in the same section share the same path prefix, which helps visitors understand where they are and helps search engines index the site.

Summary

Organize sections around visitors' tasks, keep top-level sections to five to seven, name them in visitors' words, then check with the "three clicks" and "every page has a next step" tests. Once the information architecture is clear, design and content have somewhere to land.

FIM's services cover information architecture, web design, front-end and back-end development, and SEO. You can see some of our work on the Digital experience page.