The quality of a website is determined before the first line of code. The organization of a website’s structure influences how visitors access information, as well as how search engines index each page. Since the implementation of the European Accessibility Act on June 28, 2025, navigation structure is no longer just a comfort lever: it engages the regulatory compliance of many European digital services.
Click Depth and Information Architecture: What Crawling Reveals
Most guides on website structure recommend limiting depth to three levels. This advice is correct, but it masks a more concrete problem: actual click depth does not always correspond to theoretical tree depth.
Content placed at the third hierarchical level can be accessible in one click from the homepage if a direct link is present in the main menu or in an editorial block. Conversely, a second-level page becomes difficult to reach when it is buried in a dropdown submenu that no one opens.
The organization of the site plan benefits from being thought of in terms of actual distance between the homepage and each piece of content. Mapping the most frequent navigation paths allows for the identification of orphan pages or unnecessarily long paths.
A structure built around access to the InExt Com sitemap illustrates this logic: each URL is presented in a readable manner, facilitating crawling and understanding of the hierarchy by indexing robots.
Navigation and Web Accessibility: The Concrete Requirements of WCAG 2.2
WCAG 2.2, published as a W3C recommendation on October 5, 2023, adds criteria directly related to navigation. Competitors talk about intuitive menus and smooth user experiences, but without linking these goals to the now-standardized technical constraints.
Three points from this version change the design of a site menu:
- Keyboard Focus Visibility: Each navigation element must display a visible indicator when it receives focus. A dropdown menu that hides the keyboard selection state does not meet this criterion.
- Minimum Size of Touch Targets: Menu links must have a sufficient surface area to be activated without error on mobile, which challenges menus with very tight items.
- Alternatives to Drag-and-Drop: If a page or category reorganization interface relies on drag-and-drop (in a back-office, for example), an accessible alternative must exist.
The European Accessibility Act refers to the EN 301 549 standard, which incorporates WCAG at the AA level as a basis for compliance. Any sitemap designed after June 2025 should integrate these criteria from the tree structure phase, not as a corrective measure after going live.
Categories, Tags, and Semantic Grouping of Pages
Organizing a website means creating categories that reflect users’ search logic, not the internal logic of the company. A service provider that structures its menu by department (marketing, technical, sales) forces the visitor to guess which service corresponds to their need.
Semiotic grouping involves naming and ordering sections according to the terms that users actually type. Internal search data from a site, when collected, constitutes the most reliable source for identifying these groupings.
Testing Category Consistency Without Expensive Tools
Card sorting remains the most direct method. A list of site content is presented to about ten people, without predefined categories, and they are asked to group them freely. Recurring groupings reveal the mental structure of visitors.
Categories resulting from card sorting often diverge from the initial tree structure. An e-commerce site where users group products by usage (kitchen, office, outdoor) rather than by material (wood, metal, plastic) has every interest in restructuring its navigation accordingly.
Internal Links and Linking: Structuring Paths Beyond the Menu
The main menu cannot carry everything. Beyond six or seven entries, readability decreases and decision time increases for the user. Internal linking within editorial content then takes over.
A contextual link, placed in a paragraph that addresses a related topic, transfers SEO weight to the target page while guiding the visitor. But this linking must adhere to simple rules:
- The link anchor describes the destination page, not a generic phrase (“click here” does not contribute to SEO or accessibility).
- Each important page on the site receives links from at least two or three other pages.
- Deep pages without incoming internal links are invisible to search engines, regardless of their level in the tree structure.
The footer plays a complementary role by exposing links to legal pages, main categories, and reassurance content. Field feedback varies on the actual SEO impact of the footer, but its usefulness for user experience remains documented: it provides a safety net for those who have scrolled without finding what they were looking for.
XML Sitemap and HTML Sitemap: Two Distinct Functions
The XML sitemap (sitemap.xml) is aimed at indexing robots. It lists URLs with their priority and update frequency. The HTML sitemap, on the other hand, is a page intended for human visitors who wish to view the entire structure.
Maintaining both is not redundant. The XML sitemap speeds up the discovery of new pages by search engines. The HTML sitemap allows a lost user to find their way back and improves the overall accessibility of the site.
The W3C 3.0 guidelines, currently being drafted with a draft published in September 2026, reinforce the idea of clear localization within content. The breadcrumb trail, combined with a coherent HTML sitemap, meets this requirement by indicating to the user their exact position in the tree structure.
Structuring a website for optimal navigation requires reconciling three constraints that do not always overlap: business logic, the actual paths of visitors, and the technical accessibility requirements. The available data does not allow for the designation of a universal tree structure, but sites that test their structure with real users before going live avoid the majority of costly redesigns.
