How to organize your website comes down to one exercise done before any design work: list every page the site needs, group the pages by the question a visitor is asking, and arrange the groups so that any page is reachable within three clicks from the home page. Most small business sites need between five and fifteen pages, a menu of five to seven items, and one obvious next step on every page. That sounds too simple to need a post, but the sites that lose enquiries almost always fail here: services scattered across About, a blog full of pages that should be services, a menu with eleven items and no Contact. Below is the method I use to plan a site’s pages, with the page list for a typical service business, the menu rules, and how the structure maps to folders and URLs.
What pages does a business website need?
| Page | Job | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Say what you do, for whom, where; route to services and contact | Not a summary of every page; a decision page |
| Services (hub) | List what you offer with one line each | Links to a page per service |
| One page per service | Rank for that service and answer its questions | Price range, process, examples, FAQ, button |
| About | Prove the people are real and competent | Photos of the actual team, first person, one clear next step |
| Portfolio or case studies | Show the work | One page per project for visual businesses |
| Pricing | Answer the question everyone has | Ranges are fine; “contact for a quote” alone loses the impatient half |
| Contact | Make it easy | Form, phone, email, hours, map if there is a premises |
| Blog | Answer the questions clients ask before they hire | Only if it will be kept up |
| Legal | Privacy, terms, cookies | Footer only |
| Locations | One per area served, if genuinely different | Not ten copies with the town name swapped |
Fifteen pages covers all of that for most businesses. A shop adds categories and products; a large firm adds people and sectors. If the page list runs past thirty for a small business, something is being split that should be one page.
How to organize your website pages into groups
- Write every page on a card (or a line in a spreadsheet), including pages that exist only because someone asked for them.
- Sort by the visitor’s question. “What do you do” (services), “can I trust you” (about, work, reviews), “what does it cost” (pricing), “how do I start” (contact, booking), “I want to learn” (blog). Each group is a section.
- Cut and merge. Two pages answering the same question become one. A page with under 150 words becomes a section of another page.
- Pick one parent per page. A service belongs under Services, not also under About because the founder specialises in it.
- Count the clicks. From the home page, every page should be reachable in three clicks or fewer. If it is not, it is either missing from a hub page or does not need to exist.
Nielsen Norman Group’s distinction between information architecture and navigation is worth keeping in mind here: the grouping is the architecture, and the menu is only one view of it. Design the groups first; the menu follows.
How should the menu be organised?
- Five to seven items. Services, Work, About, Blog, Contact is the template (NN/g’s menu design checklist covers the rest of the rules); add Pricing if you publish prices.
- Contact last and as a button, styled differently, so it is findable from every page without thinking.
- Dropdowns for services only when there are four or more. Dropdowns hide pages; if a service matters, it also gets a card on the Services hub page.
- Plain labels. “Services”, not “What we do”; “Work”, not “Our creations”. Visitors scan for the word they expect.
- Footer for everything else: legal pages, secondary services, social links, and a repeat of the main menu for long pages.
- Same menu on every page. A menu that changes by section is a puzzle.
Common website design mistakes include an eleven-item menu; the fix is almost always moving items into hub pages and the footer rather than deleting them.
How does the structure become URLs?
Each group becomes a folder and each page a slug inside it: /services/web-design/, /work/client-name/, /blog/post-title/. The rules for naming them, how deep to go, and what to do on each platform are in the SEO directory structure guide; the short version is lowercase, hyphens, two levels for most sites, and no changes after launch without redirects. Squarespace and WordPress both let you set a page’s parent or folder, and the slug you choose at that point is the one Google keeps, so decide it from the structure rather than the page title.
How do you organize content within a page?
- Answer first. The first screen says what the page is for and gives the main answer or offer.
- One H1, then H2s that read as the visitor’s questions, so the page can be scanned; how many H2 tags a page should have covers the pattern.
- Proof before the ask. Examples, numbers or reviews, then the button.
- One primary button per page, repeated at the bottom.
- Links to the next page in the visitor’s journey: service page to pricing, pricing to contact, blog post to the relevant service.
What about a site that already exists?
- Copy the page list from the platform (WordPress: Pages, All Pages; Squarespace: the Pages panel) and the traffic per page from Search Console for twelve months.
- Mark every page as keep, merge, or remove. Pages with traffic are kept or merged into something better, never deleted without a redirect.
- Draw the new structure using the grouping steps above.
- Redirect every changed URL. The questions to ask before a redesign include this list because it is where redesigns lose their rankings.
- Rebuild the menu last, from the structure, not from the old menu.
Organising the pages is the first working session in every web design project I run, before a colour or a font is chosen, because a site with the right fifteen pages in the right order will outperform a beautiful site with the wrong forty. If the platform itself is undecided, choosing the right website platform comes just before this step.
Frequently asked questions
List every page, group them by the visitor’s question (what you do, can I trust you, what it costs, how to start, learn more), give each page one parent, and make every page reachable within three clicks of the home page. Build the menu from those groups.
Usually five to fifteen: home, a services hub with a page per service, about, work or case studies, pricing, contact, and a blog if it will be maintained. Shops and larger firms add categories, products or people.
Five to seven. Services, Work, About, Blog and Contact is the common set, with Contact styled as a button. Everything else goes into hub pages or the footer.
Every page on the site should be reachable from the home page in three clicks or fewer. Pages buried deeper are found less by visitors and crawled less by Google.
Yes, if you want it to rank and to answer its own questions. One page per service with pricing, process, examples and a button, linked from a Services hub page that lists them all.
Export the page list with traffic per page, decide keep, merge or remove for each, plan the new structure, and 301-redirect every URL that changes before launching. Never delete a page with traffic without a redirect.
