Are you planning to develop a new website for your company or for the client of your agency? Keeping in mind website performance and SEO it's really important to have a good website architecture. Good website architecture can make your website perfectly and a bad website architecture can break your website completely. It provides maximum performance to your website and helps around 30% in every SEO campaign. In 2020 if you are developing a website you must have to focus on website architecture at the beginning of every website development project.

The website architecture process is a little critical for a big website. In this process we plan and design website technical components, functionalities, visual components of site and flow of the website. Web architecture is crafted before designing, developing and deployment of websites. Designers & Developers use it and develop websites according to website architecture.

Great website architecture is not only for SEO and Performance, it also helps us in developing a user-friendly website. Structuring your website in a proper way allows web users to navigate the website easily and retaining the attention of users on the site. If our website is not structured properly, the user will bounce back in just a few seconds and if our website has a messy structure, the search engine will not give our website high value. If you want to build a website that engages the audience and rank your website higher in the search engine, this post is for you which covers all of the points that you require for a great website.

Why is Website Architecture Important?

A great website architecture increases the potential of your website, it strengthens user experience, website performance and search engine rankings, when you structure your website in an instinctive way users can find information easily on your website that they are looking for and if website user experience is strong search engine ranking will come up higher too as search engines like Google algorithms are more focused to website technical site. Furthermore, a strong website architecture helps search engine bots to crawl websites more effectively.

Define your website goals

Before jumping into the sea, it's important to know how deep it is, same for the web development you must be aware of the intent of your website, what's the purpose of your website? Are you going to sell products? Are you selling your services? So for developing a website, you must be clear about your idea, whatever is your idea is you should have full grip on it so you will not lose track in your way that is why you are creating a website.

The best approach to remain focused on your idea is first to understand your end-user who is going to use your services or buying products in the future. Do a complete research on your idea and if you feel that this idea has more potential then go for it; maybe you have great ideas in your head still researching your idea gives you more confidence in you, taking interviews and surveys will help you a lot in this.

Sketch a website hierarchy before developing the website

Starting a website development project from scratch? Then you are in a great position to give your website a proper structure that gives the best performance to your website. Before design and developing web pages in CMS or by custom coding sketch hierarchy of your website in a paper or Excel, Word, OmniGraffle SharePoint etc. Website hierarchy is not some hard coding it's just a mapping that helps you to organize all of your web pages in a pattern which you later design and develop easily. This hierarchy you will later convert into URL structure so its important to have a fully optimized and effective website hierarchy. Try to make it simple as much as you can as website hierarchy is the beginning of great website architecture.

Design URL Structure of the whole website

Create website deep navigation Structure

Website Internal linking

Create all your important pages in the header.

Mobile Navigation

Key Components That Every Website Needs

As we have already talked about website architecture and hierarchy, there are some other important components that every website should implement in order to provide easy access to important information. Here are some basic elements that every site should integrate.

Homepage - A well-defined layout for the homepage that contains all your important information on different sections.

About Page - A well written about a page that showcases your glorious past and talks about your future plans.

Contact Us - An ideal contact page has an office address, phone numbers, map and contact form.

Services & Product Pages - If you are selling services or products makes sure you should create pages for it. Pages should be attractive and should contain a call to action section.

Legal Pages - If you are selling either services or products makes sure to add important legal pages like privacy policy, terms & condition, copyright notices and disclaimer.

Mobile-Friendly - Nowadays, a website without mobile-friendly design is a big no. You will lose so many potentials users or clients if your website looks weird on mobile devices.

Website Speed - According to google, they take care of website speed a lot in terms of SEO ranking factors. But we should take care of this matter seriously because your website is visited by humans and if your website doesn’t load properly then they will leave the website. In technical terms, it is called the bounce rate, the higher the bounce rate the more bad effect it can leave on your rankings as well as early user exit.

Conclusion

It is very important to set up your website architecture by following the above guide, if you want to impress Google and users. Once you take care of this matter efficiently then you experience a huge volume of inquiries and sales. At the end of the day, always create a website by keeping in mind the people and not for search engine bots.