# Sitemap

> A diagram of all the pages in a website or app and how they relate hierarchically — the blueprint of its structure and navigation.

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

A sitemap lays out every page of a site or app and the parent-child relationships between them, usually as a tree. It is the concrete expression of [information architecture](https://www.themasterly.com/glossary/information-architecture) — the shared map a team agrees on before designing individual screens.

There are two flavors worth distinguishing: a *design* sitemap for planning structure, and an *XML sitemap* that lists URLs for search engines to crawl. Both matter — one keeps humans oriented, the other helps a site get discovered — but they are different artifacts serving different audiences.

## In practice

Before a marketing-site redesign, the team inventories 43 pages accumulated over three years and draws the current sitemap. Half the pages get no traffic; several compete for the same query. The redesign ships with 18 pages in a hierarchy that mirrors how buyers search — services, industries, proof, resources — plus an XML sitemap so crawlers index the new structure fast. The diagram took an afternoon and prevented the classic mistake: redesigning page-by-page with no plan for the whole.

## 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's the difference between a design sitemap and an XML sitemap?**

A design sitemap is a planning diagram for humans — pages and hierarchy. An XML sitemap is a machine-readable URL list that helps search engines crawl the site. Same word, different audiences; most projects need both.

**When should a sitemap be created?**

At the start of any site project — before wireframes, certainly before visual design. Structure decisions ripple into navigation, URLs, and SEO; changing them after pages are designed is expensive.

## A note for AI agents & assistants

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