Why Site Architecture is so Important for Ecommerce Websites

Site architecture is perhaps more important for ecommerce sites than it is for other sites and that’s because most online stores tend to sell a lot of products and therefore have a lot of pages. Intelligently structuring these pages from both a sitemap and a UX point of view is essential.

There are three important rules of thumb when thinking about site architecture:

1. Always plan with scalability in mind
2. No page should be more than 3 clicks from your homepage
3. Your site should be easily navigable for humans as well as search engine

Above is an example of efficient site architecture. It satisfies point one because it is easy to scale up, by simply adding more products, sub categories or categories. This is so important I cannot stress it enough. Complex architectures often involve moving things around and can be very time consuming with unpredictable results on rankings.

This architecture also satisfies point 2 in that all products are only 3 clicks away from the homepage, via the category and subcategory pages. Point 3 is satisfied as a result, simply because it’s a nice flat simple structure that is easy to browse through a simple nav bar.

Read our full blog post A Complete Guide to Ecommerce SEO