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