Knowledge · Website Redesign
Information Architecture for Redesigns: When the Old Sitemap is the Problem
The most common redesign mistake: restyling the existing IA instead of rebuilding it. The old sitemap was built around 2020’s buyer. In 2026, it’s probably wrong. Pretty templates on broken IA convert worse than ugly templates on right IA. Here’s how to tell when your redesign needs an IA rebuild.
№ 01The signal your IA is the bottleneck
Run these three checks. Any two failing means IA is the problem, not the design:
- Top 10 landing pages by GA4 sessions: are they the pages you’d want ranking? (If users are landing on /about and /team instead of service pages, IA is failing the buyer.)
- Average pages-per-session: is it under 1.8? (Under 1.8 means buyers can’t find the next page from the page they landed on.)
- Top exit pages: are they pages without next-step CTAs? (Exits from content-heavy pages with no service link = dead ends.)
№ 02The buyer-intent reorganization
Most mid-market B2B IA is organized around the org chart: Services / About / Team / Resources / Blog / Contact. The redesigned IA should organize around buyer intent:
- ‘What do you do?’ — Services (with sub-services nested 1 level deep)
- ‘Have you done it before?’ — Work / Case Studies
- ‘How do I evaluate you?’ — Process or Pricing or Audit
- ‘How do I reach you?’ — Contact (footer + in-page CTAs, not always nav)
Three to four top-level items. Everything else is sub-navigation or footer-only.
№ 03The service-page sprawl problem
Mid-market B2B sites typically accumulate service-page sprawl over years. /services/web-design, /web-design, /custom-web-design, /web-design-services-tampa, /tampa-web-design-services. Each was created for a different campaign or by a different SEO consultant. Each dilutes the others.
The redesign IA collapses these to one canonical service page per service, with 301s from the duplicates. Local intent gets handled with separate location-modified pages under /tampa-web-design/, not by competing for the same URL.
№ 04The breadcrumb test for IA depth
Every page should be reachable in 3 clicks from the homepage. Test: pick 5 random pages from the proposed new sitemap. Can a buyer get to each in 3 clicks via the nav? If not, the IA is too deep.
The fix is usually breaking a deep tree (Services > Web Design > Custom Web Design > B2B Custom Web Design) into a flatter structure with cross-links between siblings. Hub-and-spoke beats nested-tree for both SEO (crawl efficiency) and UX (faster paths to commercial intent).
№ 05How to test the new IA before you build it
Card-sort with 5-8 actual buyers from your ICP. Print every proposed page name on an index card. Ask the buyer to group them however they’d expect. Watch which cards they hesitate on, which they put in wrong groups, which they say ‘I don’t know where this goes.’
$50 in Starbucks cards buys you 8 card-sorts. Saves you $5K in rebuilding IA after launch when GA4 tells you the same thing the card-sort would have. The agencies that skip this step are saving themselves an afternoon and costing you a quarter.
⚠What to avoid
- Asking the founder for the new IA. Founders organize by org chart; buyers organize by intent. Card-sort with buyers, not internal stakeholders.
- Keeping the old IA because ‘our SEO already ranks for those URLs.’ Half of those URLs probably don’t rank. Audit data — don’t trust narrative.
- Adding ‘Insights’ or ‘Resources’ as a top-level nav item for a B2B site with 4 blog posts. The empty section signals neglect. Keep it as a footer link or kill it.
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