A hierarchical diagram showing all the pages or screens in a product and how they connect. Sitemaps help teams plan and communicate the structure of a site before design or development begins, and expose navigational gaps or unnecessary complexity.
Common contexts
- Creating a sitemap at the start of a website redesign to align stakeholders on scope before any wireframing begins
- Auditing an existing sitemap to find orphaned pages, duplicate content paths, and sections more than three clicks from the homepage
- Using a sitemap to negotiate which content sections belong in the primary navigation versus a utility menu with a client team
Use when
Build a sitemap at the start of any project involving more than twenty pages or screens, or any redesign where the current navigation structure is being reconsidered — it's the fastest way to make structural decisions visible before they become expensive to change.
Avoid when
Don't create a detailed sitemap for single-page applications or products with highly dynamic, user-generated content structures — a static hierarchy diagram misrepresents experiences whose structure is defined at runtime rather than by IA decisions.
A sitemap that everyone agrees on in a workshop often reveals the first round of real disagreements only when you start assigning actual content to it — the abstraction of boxes and arrows lets conflicting assumptions coexist until labels force a decision.
Real-world examples
- Spotify's IA team created a sitemap of their entire product before their 2023 navigation redesign, discovering 47 orphaned pages with no inbound links — content invisible to 99% of users that was then deleted or promoted.
- The UK Government Digital Service published their full sitemap showing 300,000 pages across gov.uk, using it to identify content duplication across 25 ministerial departments and eliminate 150,000 redundant pages.
- Google's Search Console sitemap submission feature allows websites to explicitly declare their IA to Google's crawler; sites that submit structured sitemaps are indexed 30% more completely than those relying on crawling alone.