If you do not put ample thought into the structure of your website, it will be reflected in your income. The reason for this is the bad user experience poorly structured websites deliver, along with your search engine rankings taking a hit. Let’s take a look at all the ways website structure impacts your overall operation and how to perfect it.
What is website structure?
Your website structure determines the flow of content on your website including a variety of elements such as your products and services, blogs, and much more. It also helps your customers navigate your website in the best way possible to find what they are looking for.
What role does the website structure play?
The user experience your website delivers plays a huge role in whether your visitors will invest in your products and services, and revisit your website. Users visit your website to get their needs met, which a well-structured website helps simplify.
You will end up losing potential customers if they find it extremely difficult to navigate your website and find the information, products, and services they are looking for. Your visitors are more likely to move on to your competitor’s website if this happens. It will have a detrimental effect on your revenue.
A perfectly structured website also helps your SEO rankings, as it enables search engines to locate your pages and posts and the elements of your website that you intend to highlight in order to help your customers as well.
A web search won’t be able to locate you easily without a good structure in place. You need to let the search engines know the vital aspects of your website by having a proper flow. In this way, your terms and conditions page won’t end up gaining more importance than your products and services page.
How to structure your website perfectly?
Your website’s structure should be determined by the level of significance of different parts of your website’s content. Basically, it works on various levels with the element with the most significance poised on the top.
The elements that are not that important should be placed accordingly in the end. Your homepage is the first thing your users see when they visit your website so that obviously is the most important element of your website that needs to be well thought out.
It should have clear content that offers a proper understanding of your business, its products, and services, and further assists in navigating to the next steps. While the blueprints of the whole website can’t rest on the homepage itself, it should have links to the next step by highlighting the main categories.
So once the user selects the top link, they should land on a page that includes all the information about it and the sub-categories along with it. If your website reflects a huge brand with a lot of products and services, there might be a need to have further subsections to structure your website and make it easier for users to navigate it.
Search bars, menus, and Links
Search bars, menus, and a variety of links are crucial to assist customers in navigating your website and finding what they want to purchase. Links need to be placed so that your customers can move on to the next step. So from women’s wear, a link can take you to western wear. It avoids your customers from getting lost on your website by clearly signifying the steps they should take to accomplish their goals.
Read Also: A Complete Guide to Website Performance
Menus are standard in the majority of the websites that help customers get an overview of the categories of products or services the website offers along with their links. It is usually highlighted at the start of the main page. They can also have different levels in case they hold many sub-categories. However, your menu should be as precise and concise as possible.
Search bars offer great assistance in navigating big, complex websites that offer a lot of content or products. Since finding specifically what you are looking for can still be difficult even with a menu, a search bar can help streamline your search. Tags are also a good way to help your customers find what they are looking for. For instance, if the tag is ‘Chinese food’, all the food that falls under this category will be highlighted.
Conclusion
Your website will be able to offer a great user experience to all of your visitors if you have a great website structure. It helps increase your SEO rankings as well, which means your website will be shown on the foremost pages and will encounter the most traffic as a consequence. The more visitors that your website gets, the higher the possibility of conversion and in turn a boost in revenue.
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