# Sitemap

> A structured map of every page or screen in a product or site and how they relate — the blueprint of its information architecture.

- Category: Deliverables & Artifacts
- Canonical: https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/sitemap

A sitemap is a structured map of every page or screen in a product and how they relate to one another. It is the visible form of a product's [information architecture](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/information-architecture): what exists, how it nests, and what sits next to what.

The word is overloaded, and it is worth separating the two meanings at the start. A design sitemap is a diagram made for people deciding on structure. An XML sitemap is a file that tells search engines which URLs exist. This entry is about the first.

## What a sitemap answers

- **What do we actually have?** Most teams discover during this exercise that the product has more screens than anyone remembered, several of which nobody owns.
- **How deep is anything?** Counting clicks from the entry point to a frequently used screen is the fastest structural diagnostic there is.
- **What sits next to what?** Adjacency implies relationship. Items grouped in navigation are read as belonging together, whether or not they do.
- **Where does new work go?** A structure with a stated logic makes this a five-minute decision. Without one, every new feature triggers the same argument.
- **What can be removed?** Seeing the whole surface at once is the only reliable way to notice that four screens are doing one job.

## Structure follows the user's model, not the org chart

The most common structural fault in B2B products is that the navigation mirrors the company that built it. Billing is separate from account settings because different teams own them. Reports sit apart from the data they describe because they shipped in different quarters.

Users do not know any of that. They arrive with a model based on their own work: things about my company, things about my team, things about this project, things about me. Structure that matches their model needs no explanation, and structure that matches yours needs a support article.

Card sorting is the usual instrument for finding their model. Give participants the labels and let them group them, and where several people group the same way, you have a structure that will not need teaching.

## Depth, breadth, and the cost of each

Every structure trades one against the other, and neither extreme survives contact with a real product.

**Too flat** produces a navigation with nineteen top-level items, which is a list to be read rather than a structure to be understood.

**Too deep** hides things. Anything three or more levels down is effectively invisible unless a user already knows it exists and goes looking.

The practical resolution is to let usage decide rather than symmetry. Frequently used destinations belong near the top even if that makes a section lopsided, and a tidy structure where the most common task sits four levels down is tidy at the user's expense. Search changes this less than teams hope: search rescues people who know what a thing is called, which excludes most new users.

## Sitemaps for products with roles

A B2B product does not have one structure. An admin sees settings, billing and permissions that a standard member never encounters, and a read-only viewer sees a reduced version of both.

Mapping only the admin view, which is what usually happens because that is the account the designer has, produces a structure that nobody except administrators experiences. Draw the variants, or at least mark on the map which nodes are role-dependent. This is also where dead ends live: screens a member can reach through a link but not through navigation, and screens that exist only to say access is denied.

## How to build one

**Crawl or export what exists.** For a site, a crawler produces the list. For a product, the route list in the codebase is more reliable than anyone's memory, and it includes the screens that have been quietly orphaned.

**Attach numbers to each node.** Page views, unique users, and for a product, what share of accounts ever reach it. Nodes with almost no traffic are candidates for merging or deletion, and the argument is much easier to have with the number visible.

**Mark the owner.** Every node belongs to a team. The unowned ones are where stale content and broken states accumulate.

**Note the entry points.** People do not always arrive at the top. Search results, shared links, in-app notifications and emails drop users into the middle, and a structure that only makes sense from the front door fails all of them.

**Draw it, then argue about it.** The diagram exists to provoke the disagreement, and the disagreement is where the structure gets decided.

## Keeping it true

A sitemap is accurate on the day it is drawn and drifting the day after. Two things keep it from becoming misleading.

Record the reasoning, not just the shape. A note saying "billing sits under account because customers look for invoices where they look for their plan" survives a redesign; the diagram does not.

Give the structure a rule that new work can be tested against. Something as simple as "top-level items are things a user does weekly" resolves most future placement arguments without reopening the whole map, and it is the difference between a structure and an arrangement.

## In practice

A team plans a navigation redesign because customers say the product is confusing.

Mapping the existing structure first changes the brief. The product has sixty-one screens, eleven of which are unreachable from navigation at all and survive only through direct links in old emails. Settings exist in three places because three teams each added their own. The most frequently visited screen in the product, according to analytics, sits four levels deep.

None of that was in the original brief, which was to redraw the top navigation. The map turned a vague complaint into a specific list, and about a third of the work turned out to be deletion rather than design.

## Where teams get it wrong

- **Mapping the ideal product instead of the real one.** Start from what exists, including the parts nobody is proud of.
- **Mirroring the org chart.** Users do not know which team owns what and should not have to.
- **One map for every role.** The structure an admin sees is not the structure most people use.
- **Treating it as a deliverable.** A sitemap is for making decisions. Once the decisions are made, record those, because the diagram goes stale within a quarter.
- **Confusing it with the XML file.** They share a name, an audience of one machine versus many humans, and nothing else.

## Related terms

- [Information Architecture](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/information-architecture)
- [User Flow](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/user-flow)
- [Wireframing](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/wireframing)

## Learn more

- [Web Design service](https://www.themasterly.com/services/web-design)

## FAQ

**What is the difference between a design sitemap and an XML sitemap?**

They share a name and nothing else. A design sitemap is a diagram of a product's structure, made for humans deciding what goes where. An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing URLs for search engines to crawl. This entry is about the first; if you need the second, it belongs to engineering and SEO.

**What is the difference between a sitemap and a user flow?**

A sitemap shows structure: what exists and how it nests. A user flow shows sequence: the path somebody takes through it to finish a task. One is a floor plan, the other is a route through the building, and a product needs both because good structure can still contain a bad route.

**Do product apps need sitemaps, or only websites?**

Apps need them more. A marketing site's structure is visible in its navigation; a B2B product hides most of itself behind permissions, states and account settings. Mapping it is often the first time anyone sees the whole surface, and the exercise routinely finds screens nobody remembers owning.

**How detailed should a sitemap be?**

Detailed enough to answer the question you are asking. Deciding top-level navigation needs two levels. Planning a migration needs every page, its owner and its traffic. Detail beyond the decision costs time to make and more to maintain.

**Who should own the sitemap?**

Whoever owns the information architecture, usually a designer, with the content owner alongside them. The failure mode is nobody: the structure then evolves by accretion as each team adds its own screen wherever it fits.

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