Your site structure either helps people buy from you or gets in their way. There’s not much middle ground. A well-organised ecommerce site guides visitors smoothly from browsing to checkout. A messy one? People give up and shop elsewhere.
Structure affects everything—how quickly customers find products, whether search engines rank your pages, and how much you spend on advertising to get the same results. Get it right, and your whole site performs better. Get it wrong, and you’re constantly fighting an uphill battle.
What Structure Means
Site structure is how your pages connect. It’s the hierarchy from your homepage down through categories, subcategories, and individual products. It’s your navigation menus, your internal links, your URL format.
Think of it like a physical shop. When you walk into a well-designed store, you immediately understand where to go. Shoes are in one section, clothes in another. Everything’s signposted clearly. You can find what you need without asking for help.
Online, customers have even less patience. They won’t wander around trying to figure out your system. If they can’t find what they want in a few clicks, they leave. Your job is to make that journey obvious and effortless.
Flat Versus Deep Hierarchies
Some sites bury products under multiple layers—homepage, then main category, then subcategory, then sub-subcategory, finally the product. That’s exhausting. Research shows most people won’t click more than three or four times before giving up.
A flatter structure works better. Keep your top products within three clicks of the homepage. That doesn’t mean dumping everything into one massive menu. It means being strategic about your categories and using cross-linking intelligently.
For example, running shoes could live under “Shoes > Running Shoes” rather than “Products > Footwear > Athletic > Running > Shoes.” Shorter paths mean less friction. Less friction means more conversions.
Categories Need Proper Thought
Random category names confuse people. “Lifestyle Collection” or “Editor’s Picks” might sound trendy, but they don’t help customers find specific items. Clear, descriptive categories work better—even if they seem boring.
Group products logically. You might organise by type (dresses, trousers, jackets), by occasion (workwear, casual, formal), or by customer (men’s, women’s, kids). The right approach depends on what you sell and how people shop for it.
Multiple categorisation helps, too. A black dress could appear under “Dresses,” “Black Clothing,” and “Evening Wear.” That gives people different ways to discover it depending on how they’re browsing. Just make sure you handle the technical side properly to avoid duplicate content issues.
Navigation That Works
Your main navigation menu is prime real estate. Don’t waste it on stuff nobody cares about. “About Us” and “Contact” can go in the footer. Your main menu should focus entirely on helping people find products.
Mega menus work well for larger catalogues. When someone hovers over “Women’s Clothing,” they see all the subcategories at once, so they won’t get lost. Just don’t go overboard. Too many options create decision paralysis.
Breadcrumbs might seem old-fashioned, but they help. They show people where they are in your site hierarchy and let them jump back up levels easily. Search engines use them, too, which helps with rankings.
URLs Matter More Than You’d Think
Clean URLs help people and search engines understand your site. Compare these two:
• yourshop.com/womens-leather-boots
• yourshop.com/index.php?cat=47&prod=8392
The first one makes sense. You could read it out over the phone. The second is gibberish. Google prefers readable URLs because they provide context about the page content.
Keep URLs consistent with your category structure. If someone’s looking at “yourshop.com/mens-shoes/trainers/nike,” they can easily guess that “yourshop.com/mens-shoes/trainers” shows all trainers and “yourshop.com/mens-shoes” shows all men’s shoes. That predictability builds confidence.
Internal Linking Distributes Authority
Not all pages on your site have equal value to search engines. Your homepage typically has the most authority. Category pages come next. Individual product pages usually have the least (unless you’ve done specific link building for them).
Smart internal linking shares that authority around. Link from your homepage to key category pages. Link from category pages to top products. Add related product links on individual product pages. Create content that links to relevant product categories.
Mobile Changes Everything
Most ecommerce traffic comes from phones now. Your structure needs to work on small screens where space is limited. Complicated navigation that looks fine on desktop can be awful on mobile.
Hamburger menus are standard, but make sure yours doesn’t bury important categories too deep. Sticky headers that follow people as they scroll help too. The “add to basket” button should always be accessible.
Test your site on phones, not just in responsive design mode on your computer. How many taps does it take to reach a product? Can you easily get back to browsing? Is the search function prominent enough?
Getting the Performance You Deserve
This helpful guide on ecommerce site structure covers the fundamentals, but implementing it properly takes expertise. You need to balance user experience with technical SEO, conversion optimisation with site speed, and creative vision with practical constraints.
Converted has spent over a decade working on exactly these challenges. We understand that attracting traffic is pointless if your site structure stops people from converting. Our approach combines data-driven insights with conversion-focused design to help ecommerce businesses get results from their websites. If you want your site architecture to work for you rather than against you, talk to us.