Planning a sitemap

Two meanings of "sitemap"

The word covers two different things, and it helps to keep them apart.

A planned sitemap is a design document: a list of the pages a site will have, arranged in a hierarchy, with notes on each. It is written for people, the team that designs, builds and writes the site.

An XML sitemap is a file published at an address such as /sitemap.xml that lists your URLs for search engines. Google describes the format and limits: a single sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, larger sites split into several files under a sitemap index, and Google ignores the priority and change frequency fields. It does use the last-modified date, but only when that date is accurate and reflects "the last significant update to the page".

This guide is about the first kind. The second follows from it at launch.

Step 1: List the tasks

Before listing pages, list what your visitors come to do. Write each task as a verb phrase: "book a venue", "check if I am eligible", "download the annual report", "find a course near me". Good sources are site search logs, support enquiries, analytics, staff who deal with the public, and short surveys.

Group the tasks by audience if your audiences differ a lot. A university's prospective students, current students, researchers and staff need very different things.

The free information architecture worksheet collects tasks, audiences and content types into a brief.

Step 2: Take stock of the content

If you have an existing site, build an inventory: every page with its address, title, content type, owner and, if available, how many visits it gets. A crawl gives you what is publicly reachable; the content system's own list adds pages that nothing links to.

Mark each page: keep, update, merge or remove. Pages you will remove do not need a place in the new sitemap, but they do need a redirect plan later.

If the site is new, list the content you expect to publish, grouped by type: service pages, guides, events, news, profiles, forms.

Step 3: Group the content

Sort the tasks and content into groups that would make sense to your visitors. Two warnings help here.

• Do not mirror the organisation chart. Visitors do not know which team handles what, and the chart will change.
• Watch for catch-all groups. "Resources", "Information" and "More" collect leftovers and tell visitors little.

If the grouping is not obvious, run an open card sort with real users. Digital NSW suggests at least five to six participants and 30 to 40 cards. The card sorting guide explains how.

Step 4: Shape the hierarchy

Arrange the groups into levels. Aim for a structure people can scan: a handful of top-level sections, each with a clear scope, and subsections only where a section holds enough distinct content to need them.

The Australian Government Style Manual advises keeping hierarchies shallow, with no more than four heading levels in a document. A website can go deeper than that where a large collection needs it, but every extra level is another decision a visitor must get right. Where pages sit deep, plan other ways to reach them: search, hub pages and related links.

Paste your draft into the hierarchy visualiser to see pages per level and spot crowded sections.

Step 5: Name everything

Give each section and page a label. Use the words your visitors use, which you collected in step 1. Keep labels short, specific and distinct from one another. Read the top-level labels aloud in a row; if two sound alike, change one.

Step 6: Assign addresses

Give every page an address. Google's URL guidance recommends readable words, hyphens between them and consistent lower case. Decide whether addresses nest under their sections or stay flat; the URL structure guide explains the trade-offs. The sitemap builder suggests addresses from your titles in either style.

Step 7: Add the detail

A planned sitemap becomes far more useful with a few columns beside each page:

• Purpose: one line on what the page is for.
• Content type: which template it uses.
• Owner: who keeps it accurate.
• Source: which existing page or pages it replaces.
• Phase: needed at launch, or later.

Step 8: Test it

Before design starts, check the plan with real scenarios. In a workshop, read out tasks and ask colleagues where they would go. Better still, run a tree test with people outside the organisation: give them the text-only structure and a set of tasks, and see where they look. Change whatever fails, then test again.

Step 9: Plan the links

A hierarchy is not enough on its own. Each page should link to its parent and to related pages. Google's link guidance asks for every important page to be reachable from "at least one other page on your site". Note in the sitemap where hub pages will link down to detailed pages and where related links will cross between sections.

Step 10: Turn it into sitemap.xml at launch

Once the site is built, generate the XML sitemap from the live pages, not from the plan, so that every address in it works. Submit it in Search Console. If you are replacing an old site, submit the new sitemap after the redirects are in place.

A worked illustration

Mistakes to watch for

• Planning the sitemap from the old site's menu instead of from visitor tasks.
• Creating a section for each team or department.
• Using clever or branded names for sections that visitors will not recognise.
• Leaving out the pages that hold everything together: contact, accessibility, privacy and search results.
• Forgetting that every planned page needs an owner after launch.

Keeping the sitemap alive after launch

A planned sitemap goes stale the day after launch unless someone keeps it. Assign an owner, keep the spreadsheet in a shared place, and update it whenever a page is added, moved or retired. Review it against the live site twice a year. A current sitemap makes the next redesign, migration or audit far cheaper, because the inventory is already done.

When to get help

A sitemap for a small site can be planned in a day with these steps. For larger sites, several audiences or a merger of sites, a sitemap planning engagement adds research, testing and a full specification for designers and developers.

Sources checked 4 November 2026 for planning a sitemap

1. Sitemaps, Google
2. Hierarchical structure, Style Manual
3. Card sorting, Digital NSW
4. Links, Google
5. URL structure, Google