Website navigation structure, hubs and spokes

Hubs and spokes, the shape that scales

A hub is a page that introduces a group. A spoke is one page in that group. Services is a hub; each service is a spoke. Areas is a hub; each town is a spoke.

The shape works at any size. Three services and two towns fit it. Twenty services across a dozen towns fit it too, because every new page has an obvious parent.

Every page gets one parent and one place. A page that could live in two hubs lives in one and is linked from the other.

Website Builder Studio builds in this shape from the start. Before the build runs you see the planned pages, grouped, and you approve the list. Nothing is written until the shape is agreed.

How many items belong in the top navigation

The top menu is for hubs, not for every page. Home, services, areas, about, contact. About five items, rarely more than seven.

A menu with fifteen items is a list nobody reads, and on a phone it is a scroll. Anything that is not a hub belongs inside one, or in the footer.

Name the items the way a customer would. Services, not solutions. Areas we serve, not coverage. A menu label is the shortest copy on the site, and it still has to be true.

Breadcrumbs show where a page lives

A breadcrumb is the small trail near the top of a page: Home, then Services, then this service. It tells a visitor where they are and gives them a way back up.

Search engines read the same trail and learn the shape of the site from it. Every page the builder publishes carries breadcrumbs, so the shape is never a guess.

On a phone, a breadcrumb is also the quickest way back to the hub. One tap, no menu to open.

Related links carry a reader to the next page

A person reading about furnace repair may want furnace replacement, or the town they live in. Links between related pages let them get there without going back to the menu.

Those links also tell a search engine which pages belong together. The builder writes internal links between related pages as part of every site, so no spoke stands alone.

The right related links are the obvious ones. On a service page, the sibling services and the areas where you offer it. On an area page, the services you offer there. Not every page on the site.

A page nobody links to is a page nobody finds

A page with no links pointing to it is called an orphan. A visitor cannot reach it, and a search engine has little reason to think it matters. That holds even if the sitemap lists it, and even if the page is genuinely useful.

A sitemap says a page exists. A link says a page belongs. You want both, and the link is the one people forget.

When you add a page of your own, check it has a link from its hub. If it does not, ask the in-app assistant to add one to the hub page's copy.

How a site of up to 100 pages stays orderly

The Scale and Platform plans allow up to 100 pages per site. That is a lot of pages, and without a shape it becomes a pile fast.

Three things keep it orderly. The hub-and-spoke shape, so every page has a parent. The planned page list you see and approve before the build runs. And a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

Part of that check is uniqueness. It strips city, state and industry names before it measures, so a filler page with the town swapped scores as a copy and does not get in.

The result is a site where every page is one of a group, every group has a hub, and every hub is one click from the top.

What is yours to decide

Which hubs exist, what they are called, and which pages sit under them. That comes from the interview: your services, your areas, what makes you different.

The footer links are yours too. Ask the in-app assistant to set them. Keep them to the things a visitor looks for at the bottom of a page: contact, hours, the legal pages you uploaded.