Content plays a tremendous role in a website’s success. After all, it's the primary reason why people visit a site. But it’s not only the quality of the content that impacts a site's performance; the way information is organized on the page is equally important.
Modern websites contain a lot of information, so if your content is unorganized, navigation becomes difficult—and quickly leads to abandoned sites. On the other hand, when information is organized according to the user's expectations, it becomes easier to navigate. The discipline responsible for a content organization is called information architecture.
Creating clear website information architecture is integral to good website design. So we're breaking it all down, including what information architecture is and why it's essential. From there, you can follow the process we laid out as you build the information architecture of your next website.
Go from AI-generated website information architecture to live site on Wix Studio.
Everything you need to know about website information architecture
What is information architecture?
Information architecture is the practice of organizing complex information clearly and logically so that website visitors or product users can easily find everything they need. It’s better understood by breaking it down into these three main components:
Page hierarchy is the structure of a site and how information is grouped together. It’s a hierarchy in the sense that specific, “child” topics can sit within wider, “parent” topics. Gestalt principles of design—which define how the human eye perceives objects—play an important role in organizing content for seamless comprehension.
A global navigation system is how users navigate between screens or pages, and is consistently visible on each page throughout the site. It’s a fancier way of referring to navigational elements you’re already familiar with, like horizontal menus.
A visual sitemap is the hierarchical diagram of your website and shows how the pages are linked and labeled.
Information architecture is the backbone of any design project, determining both the functionality and visual design of a website.
Why is information architecture important?
Information architecture benefits both users and the business’s bottom line in three significant ways:
Improving the user experience drives conversion and retention. Good website information architecture helps users find what they're looking for more quickly.
Improving the user experience can reduce marketing costs. Adding on to the point above, by more easily acquiring and retaining users, a business will spend less on marketing budget to attract new users.
A website’s good information architecture can improve search rankings. Search engines rank websites with good usability higher, and information architecture is a cornerstone of usability.
Foundational principles of information architecture
Dan Brown, a seasoned information architect, coined Eight Principles of Information Architecture. The list below combines Dan Brown's collection of principles, primarily focused on creating a solid structure, with the well-known tenets of interaction design. Here are a few essential principles to follow when designing your website’s information architecture:
Reduce all unnecessary information. “Less is more” is one of the essential principles of design that can be applied to anything, including content. Get rid of anything that does not support user and business goals.
Follow the "right place, right time" rule. When designing a sequence of messaging or UI prompts, create a logical order for maximum impact.
Minimize extra actions. If finding information is a long journey, the visitors will jump ship and find a better alternative. Keep in mind the three-click rule that states that a website visitor should be able to find what they’re looking for with no more than three mouse clicks.
Remember that content has a lifecycle. Your site’s content isn’t static—over time, it needs to be refreshed and updated, informed by performance data, market trends or website usability insights.
Prioritize information. Show users the most crucial content upfront and reveal all secondary content on demand. A technique called progressive disclosure can help you with that. Progressive disclosure initially shows users only the most important content and key features, and offers more content or a larger set of features upon request. For example, news websites provide a preview of the latest news on the home page, and visitors select where they want to go deeper.
Scalable information architecture. You need to consider if your website’s information architecture will still work as you create more content and pages for your site. When you consider how well the system will scale, you minimize the chance that you use too complicated structure.
What's the process for defining and applying information architecture to a web design?
Information architecture design is a long and complex process—you need to consider a lot of different factors to organize content logically. Plus, information architecture design can involve collaboration with numerous stakeholders—clients, product designers, content writers, strategists, developers, sales and marketing specialists.
If you want to cut down the time for designing your website’s architecture, then check Wix Studio’s visual sitemap generator which organizes page hierarchy and site navigation customized to your project. (More on that below when we cover tools for website information architecture.)
If you prefer to go through the process manually, step by step, here’s a walk-through for developing your website’s information architecture.
01. Define company goals
Building a website’s information architecture should always start with defining your company’s global priorities, such as:
Business goals. What do you want to achieve with your website?
User needs or wants. What do users want from your website?
To answer those questions, you need to work closely with your stakeholders and define key performance indicators (KPI) that you will use to measure your success. For example, if you’re designing a Wix Studio eCommerce site, one of the KPIs will be your store’s conversion rate—the number of visitors who purchase something to the total number of visitors.
02. Conduct user research to understand user goals
The goal of user research is to understand what content your visitors expect to find on your website, where they hope to find it, and how they wish to interact with it. During this step, it's essential to consider various aspects that can influence users' behavior and actions, including user emotions. Here’s how:
Conduct user interviews. User interviews will give you a better understanding of user needs and wants, and what your target audience finds valuable. Then, you can design to satisfy those needs.
Create personas. A user persona is an archetype of your ideal visitor. You’ll create this based on your user interview findings, and your entire team will refer to this persona throughout the design process to maintain consistency and utility.
Write scenarios of interactions with your website. Scenarios of interactions will help you understand how users will interact with your content and flow through your site’s pages. A technique called storyboarding will help you visualize the scenario of interaction so that anyone can understand it.
03. Analyze your competitors
Competitor analysis will help you understand how your competitors organize information on their websites and what your users might expect. “Users spend most of their time on other sites,” as Jakob Nielsen, web usability consultant and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group, said in UX Conference London. “This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
When you conduct a competitor analysis, aim to answer the following questions:
What makes this website good, and what makes it bad? (Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ sites.)
How is the information displayed on the page? (Sketch out the hierarchy of information that your competitors use on their pages.)
How is the information distributed between different pages? (Create a visual sitemap that reflects the navigation and flow your competitors use.)
04. Content inventory and analysis
If you’re working on an existing site, start by auditing the existing content. (If you’re working on a new site, use this step to think about what you want to say about your client’s business.) As businesses evolve, trends change and more content is created, it’s possible that the previous content system is now less effective.
There are two stages to reviewing and assessing content:
Content inventory is a process of collecting all information that you show (or plan to show) on your website. If a website already has content, first collect everything: text content, media files that visitors can download, and videos. If you don't have a website, collect all the content that you plan to show on your website. It's vital to understand what content you have and who in your organization will be responsible for it.
Content analysis helps you assess the importance of your content for end-users and the business. Try to evaluate every content item based on its usefulness for the user and relevance. At the end of this process it will be much easier to decide what to keep and what to get rid of.
05. Create your website's organizational systems
Now that you’ve taken inventory of your site’s content, and decided what to keep and what to lose, it’s time to create some structure. To do that you’ll use each of the four systems—yes, all four. When completed, the outcomes of these four systems come together to form your sitemap. The four systems are:
Hierarchical system
Webpages have a top-down hierarchy, with the most important information at the top—like the brand and product names—and less important information further below. Since visitors are less likely to scroll down the length of the page, you want to prioritize your main message for the site’s top fold. The hierarchy you create for your site should reflect your site’s goals. For example, both music venues and universities promote events on their websites. However, a music venue’s website would list upcoming events at the top whereas a university’s website would first list student and faculty accomplishments, pushing events further down the page.
Labeling system
The homepage for Apple’s online store contains over 5,000 words including item names, product page links, sales offers, payment deals and other promotional fine print. Thanks to the single-word page label “Store,” Apple’s visitors can confidently determine if this page’s content will meet their needs before clicking and spending—or wasting—time reading.
Follow your site’s hierarchy to create labels for every page within the site, similar to how Apple’s “Store” includes labels for lower-hierarchy content such as “Mac” and “iPhone.” These labels help your team plan, create and organize relevant content for each page as well as help users quickly and easily find the information they’re looking for. A great way to understand labeling is to look at a website’s footer, which lists the labels of every page, organized by hierarchy.
Labeling can be a hands-on activity with a technique called cart sorting. Users or experts organize the content or topics from their perspectives into categories, helping you create labels that reflect real user expectations.
Navigation system
A navigation system helps users move through the site’s content. These systems come in different shapes and sizes, depending on site design, number of pages and device type. For example, hamburger menus are one example of mobile-friendly navigation.
Clarity and simplicity are the most critical properties of navigation. And keep in mind that your site has numerous entry points: visitors can arrive directly to your homepage, product page, blog or support page. No matter where they arrive, they need to easily find their way through your site using your navigation system.
Now that you’ve created the website’s hierarchical, labeling and navigational systems, you can draw up a sitemap to visualize how these systems fit together.
Searching system
If your website offers a lot of content, search makes it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for with the least amount of clicks. You’ll need to consider how your content is labeled to facilitate search—such as topic tags for blog articles, or product categories for merchandise—as well as how results are displayed and filtered.
06. Prototype a design
A prototype is an initial sample or test-run of your idea, based on all the information you’ve collected thus far. Depending on your stage in the design process and how you intend to utilize the prototype, you can create a low fidelity or a high fidelity prototype:
A lo-fi prototype contains only the bare essential elements of design. It’s valuable at the early stages of product development because it helps determine if the product design direction does or doesn’t work for your user.
A hi-fi prototype looks and works almost like a finished design. It’s more suitable for later stages when you want to collect more specific feedback on your design, such as how your website’s color scheme makes visitors feel.
Since the goal of information architecture design is to find a proper structure for the content, usually creating a low-fi prototype will suffice. To get you started, we’ve rounded up the best prototyping tools for web designers.
07. Validate your web design
At this step you need to understand how your web design’s architecture performs for your user. You can apply a few different methods:
Tree testing
Tree testing shows product designers if the names selected for the site's categories are understandable to their visitors. Participants are asked to navigate through a website using only link names, and product designers measure the number of errors. As long as the content is organized intuitively, there will be few errors.
Usability testing
Conduct a series of usability tests to understand which areas of your website cause friction, and which are smooth sailing. Before testing, you need to align on two key components:
Tasks users have to complete, such as finding detailed information about product and pricing plans.
Define the metrics you want to measure, such as the time it takes for a user to complete the task (also known as time-to-completion), completion rate or number of errors.
Go from information architecture to live design all in one place with Wix Studio.
What tools help create a website’s information architecture?
Here are five pro-grade tools to help create your new website’s information architecture.
01. Wix Studio
Wix Studio can help design your website’s architecture from start to finish.
First, the visual sitemap generator uses AI to create a custom information architecture diagram of your site’s pages, hierarchies and navigation. From there, you can edit, rename and move pages and sections around—and add new pages with or without AI.
Then, design prototypes in the low-code, no-code website builder to use for testing. You’ll collect more detailed feedback on user interactions that can help optimize your site design before creating the final product.
Throughout the process, Wix Studio’s collaboration features allow you to engage as few or as many stakeholders as needed—including internal teams and clients—and to customize individual user permissions. With everyone in-sync on the sitemap or design canvas, your agency can manage projects and clients more efficiently.
02. Google Adword Suggestion
Finding a proper label for a section or page isn’t a simple task, but you can make it easier using Google's Adword Suggestion tool. This tool will help you find the term that people use more frequently to create a more familiar experience.
03. Miro
Miro is an online board for collaboration. This tool is ideal for creating the structure of a website, such as flowcharts or sitemaps.
04. UserZoom
UserZoom allows you to collect and analyze insights about user behavior. It offers many valuable user research and testing modules, including tree testing.
05. HotJar
HotJar is another user behavior tool on our list. This tool is primarily used for analyzing website heatmaps, session recordings and actual feedback from real visitors.
With the amount of information online increasing every day, it's more important than ever to help people find precisely what they’re looking for—and quickly. For a good user experience, start with good website information architecture. Kick off your next client project with proper website architecture planning to create an effective design built around an intuitive experience.
Get your site’s information architecture started on Wix Studio.
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