How do you design a category structure that suits your website?

A suitable website category structure should start with the relationships between content and the needs of the audience: first take inventory of the content and organize it by topic, then choose parent–child hierarchies or overlapping categories, and finally test the structure with information-finding tasks. The goal is not to apply a fixed number of levels or create a page for every keyword, but to make sure the categories fit the content and that users can follow them to find the information they need.

Map content relationships before naming categories

A 2023 article on Neil Patel’s website recommends first understanding how content on the site relates to other content and identifying the main categories, regardless of the classification approach you choose. Start your inventory by asking:

• Which pages belong to the same broader topic?
• Which pieces of content share characteristics that span more than one category?
• Which pages differ only in their keywords but actually address the same topic?

The article advocates organizing pages by topic rather than creating a separate page for every keyword variation. For example, “Marketing campaigns” could be a main category, with tags such as “Email marketing” and “Social media marketing” connecting related content. This is advice on content organization, not a requirement to combine all similar terms on a single page.

Use parent–child hierarchies for clearly defined items, and retain horizontal relationships where content overlaps

A parent–child structure suits content with relatively clear category boundaries. The article above uses an online store selling pants, shirts, and accessories as an example: establish broad product categories first, then add more specific categories beneath them to show relationships from broad to narrow.

If a website’s content frequently overlaps, it should not be forced into a single path. Topics such as “Marketing strategy,” “Brand strategy,” and “Marketing campaigns” on a marketing blog may share common ground, so the article suggests considering a horizontal or faceted structure. The choice should be based on the content and audience, not on which structure looks the tidiest.

Keep the hierarchy simple, but do not treat suggested numbers as rules

A 2022 article by awoo recommends keeping a website to around four or five levels, making the lowest-level pages accessible in about three or four clicks, and avoiding too many layers of subcategories. These are the article’s recommendations for site structure, not current mandatory search engine rules, nor do they guarantee that pages will be indexed or rank higher.

These numbers can serve as a reference when checking whether a hierarchy is too deep; the actual categories still need to fit the content, rather than forcing a structure to meet the numbers.

Validate the structure with tree testing, rather than just checking whether URLs look tidy

Tree testing, as described by NN/g in 2023, asks participants to select categories level by level according to a task until they reach the location they believe contains the target information. The test tree should cover global navigation, include utility navigation where necessary, and extend to the lowest subcategory containing the resource needed for the task—not just test top-level labels.

When reviewing an existing website, it is also important to distinguish category logic from technical paths. A guest article published by Screaming Frog in 2026 notes that URLs may reflect historical or technical constraints, crawl diagrams tend to show discovery paths, and internal link diagrams show linking behavior. None of these necessarily represents the formal category hierarchy. Diagrams can support analysis, but they cannot determine on their own whether the categories make sense.