How we plan a sitemap in one workshop

Sitemaps tend to grow by accident. A page is added for a campaign, another for a product line, a third because a director asked for it, and five years later the navigation has eleven items and nobody is sure which pages still matter. A redesign is the moment to fix that, and we try to do it in a single two-hour workshop.

Before the room

The workshop only works if the homework is done. In the week before, we gather three things:

• A full crawl of the current site, with every URL, its title and its template.
• Twelve months of analytics: entrances, conversions and search traffic for each page.
• The client’s written brief, especially the answers about who the site is for and what they should do.

From the crawl we print a card for every page that has had meaningful traffic or links in the last year. For a typical business site this is between 40 and 120 cards. Pages with no visits and no links go on a separate list for redirection, and we rarely need to discuss them.

We also ask the sales team for the five pages they send to prospects most often. They rarely match the analytics, and they are almost always important.

The four rules

We open the workshop by agreeing four rules. They sound strict. They save hours.

1. Every page needs a visitor. If nobody can name who the page is for, it does not make the cut.
2. Every page needs an owner. One person in the business who will keep it accurate.
3. No more than six items in the main navigation. Everything else lives one level down, in the footer or inside the content.
4. Names come from the visitor’s vocabulary, not the organisation chart.

Sorting the wall

We stick the cards to a long wall in three columns: keep, merge and remove. The team sorts them quickly and out loud, with the analytics printed on each card so that opinions meet numbers. A page that someone loves but that had forty visits last year can still stay, but the conversation is a different one.

Merging is where most of the value is. Five thin service pages often become one strong page with sections, and three overlapping about pages become one. Each merge gets an arrow on the wall showing which old URLs will redirect where, and that becomes our redirect map later.

Grouping by intent

Once the keep pile is settled, we group the remaining cards by what the visitor is trying to do rather than by topic. Typical groups are “understand what you do”, “see proof”, “check the details” and “get in touch”. The groups become candidates for the main navigation, and the labels on the cards are rewritten in the words customers use. Search queries from Search Console settle most naming arguments.

Then we walk the two or three key visitors from the brief through the new structure, one at a time, from the page they would most likely land on to the action we want them to take. If a journey needs more than three clicks, or passes through a page with no clear next step, we move cards until it does not.

What leaves the room

At the end of the two hours we photograph the wall, and within a day we send back three documents:

• The new sitemap, with every page’s visitor, owner and template type.
• A redirect map from every old URL to its new home.
• A list of content to write or rewrite, with an owner and a date for each.

The sitemap becomes the backbone of the design phase. Each template type is designed once and reused, which is why a well-planned sitemap usually makes the build cheaper as well as clearer. And because the redirect map exists from the first week, protecting search rankings at launch is a checklist rather than a scramble.

Try it on your own site

You can run a smaller version without us. Export your pages from analytics, print the top fifty, and sort them with two colleagues against the four rules. Even if you are not planning a redesign, you will find pages to merge, labels to change and at least one navigation item that nobody can explain.