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Site architecture

📖 4 min readUpdated 2026-04-18

Site architecture is how your pages relate to each other, through navigation, internal links, and URL hierarchy. Good architecture makes every page discoverable in a few clicks, concentrates authority on the pages that matter, and signals topic relationships clearly.

The 3-click rule

Every important page should be reachable from the homepage in ≤3 clicks. This isn't about usability alone, deep pages get less authority flowed to them and crawl less often.

Flat vs deep architectures

Flat

homepage
  ├── page1
  ├── page2
  ├── page3
  ...
  └── page500

Every page one click from homepage. Works for small sites (<100 pages). Doesn't scale.

Deep

homepage
  └── category1
      └── subcategory1-a
          └── subcategory1-a-i
              └── product

Discoverable but takes many clicks. Crawl depth penalizes leaf pages.

The sweet spot: broad + shallow

homepage
  ├── category1
  │     ├── subcategory1a (hub)
  │     │     ├── post1
  │     │     ├── post2
  │     │     └── post3
  │     └── subcategory1b (hub)
  ├── category2
  │     └── ...
  └── about / contact / etc.

Most sites should aim for 2-3 levels deep. Categories (level 2) serve as topic hubs. Every leaf page gets to the homepage in ≤3 clicks.

The hub-and-spoke model

For content-heavy sites (blogs, documentation, e-commerce categories):

This model concentrates authority on the hub, which then passes to spokes, which then interlink with each other. Google sees a coherent topic cluster.

Internal linking patterns that support architecture

URL structure reflects architecture

URLs should map to the hierarchy:

Category-folder URLs signal hierarchy to both users and Google.

Common architectural mistakes

Tools