A visitor who arrives on a poorly organized site leaves within seconds. The structure of a website influences navigation, search engine optimization, and the trust that users place in your pages. Before thinking about design or written content, it is the technical and logical framework of the site that deserves full attention.
Accessibility and regulatory compliance from the website design
Have you ever visited a site where the menu disappears when using the keyboard, or where the contrasts make the text unreadable on mobile? This type of flaw is no longer just an ergonomic issue. Since June 28, 2025, the European Accessibility Act applies to many digital products and services offered in the European Union.
Specifically, this means that a site must plan from its design for a functional keyboard navigation, sufficient contrasts between text and background, and compatibility with assistive technologies like screen readers. This is not a cosmetic addition at the end of the project: it is a structural criterion.
Consent to cookies illustrates this logic well. A banner slapped on afterwards is not enough. The structure of the site must integrate a refusal mechanism as simple as acceptance, an easily accessible withdrawal from any page, and the technical blocking of unnecessary trackers before any consent.
As recent actions by the CNIL remind us, placing cookies without valid consent exposes one to heavy financial penalties. An analysis of a website’s structure on Tekniko helps to better understand the fundamentals that support these technical requirements.
Hierarchy and internal linking: organizing pages for the user and Google
The hierarchy is the site plan viewed from above. It determines how many clicks separate your homepage from each piece of content. A visitor should reach any page within three clicks at most. Beyond that, the abandonment rate increases, and search engines index deeper pages less effectively.
Thinking in thematic silos
Group your pages by large coherent categories. A service site can be organized around three or four main themes, each containing specific sub-pages. This hierarchy helps Google understand the relationship between your contents.
Internal linking connects these pages to each other. Each internal link transmits SEO weight and guides the visitor to complementary content. Take the example of a “pricing” page that links to a “FAQ” page and a contact form: each internal link shortens the path to conversion.
Common hierarchy mistakes
- Orphan pages (no internal links pointing to them), invisible to search engines and visitors
- Excessive depth with unnecessary subcategories that dilute the site’s SEO authority
- Inconsistent URLs that do not reflect the actual hierarchy of pages (for example, a “contact” page placed under “/blog/contact”)
Performance of internal pages on mobile: the overlooked weak point
Most speed audits focus on the homepage. Data from the Web Almanac 2025, based on the Chrome UX Report, reveals a notable gap: homepages achieve 80% good results in mobile INP, compared to 69% for internal pages. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measures the responsiveness perceived by the user during an interaction.
Why this gap? Internal pages often accumulate third-party scripts, forms, image galleries, or widgets that are absent from the homepage. These elements weigh down response time without anyone noticing, because no one tests these pages.
A useful performance audit covers at least five to ten representative pages of the site: product page, category page, blog article, contact page, legal page. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights allow testing of any URL, not just the root of the domain.
Structured content and tags: what search engines really read
A search engine does not see your site like a human. It reads code. HTML tags indicate the hierarchy of information: main title, subtitles, paragraphs, lists. A page without a coherent tag structure loses visibility, even if its content is excellent.
Each page must have a unique H1 title, logically ordered H2 and H3 subtitles, and meta descriptions written to entice clicks in search results. Structured tags (schema.org) also enrich the display in Google with rich snippets.
Content serving the structure
A common mistake is to write all the content first, then try to fit it into a hierarchy. The reverse approach works better:
- First, define the targeted search queries for each page
- Build the hierarchy around these queries, ensuring there is no cannibalization (two pages targeting the same keyword)
- Then write the content for each page respecting the planned tag structure
- Check that each page addresses a specific and distinct search intent
This method avoids duplicate pages and ensures that each URL of the site has a reason to exist in the eyes of Google.
The structure of a website is not a topic that is dealt with once and for all during the initial development. Each new page added, each partial redesign of the design or content, can weaken the whole if the hierarchy and performance are not reevaluated. A well-structured site remains a site that is regularly audited, page by page, on mobile as well as on desktop.
