Structure is what turns pages into a site

Why it starts to matter

A ten page site needs no structure. Everything is in the menu and every page is one click away.

At fifty pages the menu cannot hold everything, links become arbitrary, and pages start being buried where nobody finds them.

That is the point to group. Not because a rule says so, but because the alternative is a site nobody can navigate including you.

Below about thirty pages structure barely matters. Above it, the alternative to grouping is a site nobody can navigate, including you.

What a hub page does

It introduces a subject, explains what the section covers, and links to every page beneath it with a line saying what each one is.

For a visitor it is a table of contents for one subject. For a search engine it is a clear statement that you cover this area in depth rather than in passing.

It also solves depth. A hub keeps forty pages two clicks from the homepage instead of scattered five deep.

Choosing sections

Group by what a visitor is trying to do, not by how your business is organized internally. Customers do not know your departments and do not care.

Aim for sections that are genuinely distinct. If you cannot explain the difference between two sections in a sentence, they are one section.

Between four and eight top level sections suits most small businesses. Fewer means overstuffed groups, more means a menu nobody reads.

Group by what a visitor is trying to do, not by how the business is organized internally. Customers do not know your departments.

Depth

Every page should be reachable within about three clicks of the homepage. Pages further out are visited less by people and crawled less by machines.

Depth is about clicks rather than folders. A page at the root of the domain that nothing links to is deeper, in the way that matters, than one three folders down and linked from the menu.

If something important is four clicks away, that is a structure problem rather than a linking problem.

Linking within a section

Every page links up to its hub, sideways to two or three genuinely related siblings, and outward to anything it naturally references.

That pattern means a reader can move along a subject without returning to the menu, and an engine sees a cluster rather than a scatter.

It is also the structure that survives growth. Adding a page to a section that already works requires no rethinking.

Up to the hub, sideways to two or three genuine siblings, outward to anything naturally referenced — the pattern described in internal linking.

What not to do

Do not build a section for a subject you have one page about. An empty hub is worse than no hub.

Do not create sections to match keywords rather than subjects. The structure has to make sense to a person first.

Do not restructure often. Every change costs redirects and confuses returning visitors, so it is worth thinking through once.

• Build a section for a subject you have one page about
• Create sections to match keywords rather than subjects
• Restructure often, which costs redirects every time
• Bury an important page four clicks from the homepage
• Put everything in one section because it was easier
• Let a hub page become a list of links with no content of its own

How ours is organized

Sites built here group pages into hubs, with each hub listing its pages, each page carrying a breadcrumb back, and related links drawn from the same structure.

The plan comes before the pages, which is what stops a site becoming a pile. Pages here are written from a conversation about your business, and that conversation decides the sections before anything is written.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, and a page with no place in the structure does not publish.

The plan comes before the pages, which is what stops a site becoming a pile as it grows.