A website that aggregates sectors, announcements, and resources around reuse in construction presents a navigation problem that most showcase sites do not encounter. The audiences are heterogeneous (project owners, craftsmen, local authorities, individuals), the content mixes product sheets, informative pages, and practical tools, and the risk of losing the visitor after the second click is real. In this context, the readability of the structure becomes a technical as well as an editorial challenge.
Navigation and cognitive load: the ceiling of main menus
The UX design guides published in 2025-2026 converge on a point rarely formalized in general articles: limit the main menu to five, a maximum of seven entries. Beyond that, the visitor’s visual scanning ability drops, cognitive load increases, and the click-through rate on items located at the end of the navigation bar decreases significantly.
For a site like Refair, whose scope covers both material announcements, resource pages, and spaces dedicated to professionals, this constraint necessitates trade-offs. Grouping “announcements” and “materials” under one entry, or separating paths by user profile, changes the way the visitor perceives the service right from the homepage.
By consulting the structure of the Refair site, one can see how the top-level categories attempt to respond to this logic of grouping without overwhelming the user with options. The sitemap makes visible all indexed pages and allows for checking whether the click depth (the number of levels to reach a page) remains reasonable.
HTML sitemap and XML sitemap: two files, two distinct functions
The confusion between HTML sitemap (intended for visitors) and XML sitemap (intended for indexing bots) persists in many articles about site structure. The two have neither the same format, nor the same role, nor the same audience.
- The HTML sitemap is a page of the site, accessible from the footer or the menu, that lists all sections and subpages in the form of clickable links. It serves as a backup plan for lost users and improves internal linking.
- The XML sitemap is a technical file submitted to search engines (Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools). It indicates the URLs to be indexed, their update frequency, and their relative priority.
- A site can have one without the other, but having both remains the recommended practice, especially when the volume of pages exceeds a few dozen.
On a site focused on reuse and the circular economy, where material announcements are created and disappear as stocks change, the XML sitemap must be updated dynamically so that Google does not index outdated pages. The HTML sitemap, on the other hand, reflects the permanent structure of the site, which does not change with the announcements.
Navigation depth and internal linking on a reuse site
A widely shared design rule states that no strategic page should be more than three clicks away from the homepage. This rule has its limits (it does not take into account the entry context to the site, often an internal page via Google), but it remains a good indicator of the compactness of a structure.
On Refair, the categories of materials, resource pages, and practical sheets constitute different levels. If a craftsman is looking for a lot of reused oak beams, their ideal path goes through the homepage, a “materials” or “announcements” category, then the sheet for the lot. Three levels, three clicks.
Adding a geographical filter or a filter by type of material interposes an additional level, which can be acceptable as long as the internal linking offers shortcuts from each page.
Internal linking (the links between pages of the same site) is not just an SEO lever. It compensates for the limitations of a deliberately short main menu. Contextual links in the body of pages, “see also” boxes at the bottom of sheets, related category suggestions allow the visitor to navigate laterally without having to go back to the root every time.
The case of orphan pages
An orphan page is a page that exists on the server but has no internal links pointing to it. It is invisible to the visitor and, in practice, almost invisible to Google. On a dynamic site with ephemeral announcements, the risk of inadvertently creating orphan pages increases with each deletion of a lot or sheet. Regularly auditing the sitemap allows for spotting these isolated pages before they degrade the overall quality of indexing.
Adaptive structure: when the path changes according to the visitor
Recent UX trends (2025-2026) highlight modular interfaces, sometimes called “bento grid,” where the content blocks displayed on the homepage or category pages adapt to the visitor’s profile. An individual looking for patio slabs does not need to see resources intended for public project owners first.
The structure of the site is no longer just a fixed plan, it becomes partially dynamic. This personalization relies on simple signals: new visitor or returning visitor, pages viewed during the previous session, geographical location. It does not replace the static structure (the sitemap remains the skeleton), but it complements it by reorganizing the visible surface.
Field feedback diverges on this point: some B2B platforms report an improvement in conversion rates after personalization, while others find that visitors feel disoriented when the homepage changes from one visit to another. The relevance of this type of adaptation depends on the number of truly distinct user profiles and the frequency of return to the site.
Structure audit: concrete checkpoints
Analyzing a site’s structure is not limited to looking at the menu. Several elements deserve methodical verification.
- The consistency between the main menu and the HTML sitemap: all entries in the menu must appear in the sitemap, and vice versa for top-level pages.
- The actual depth of the most consulted pages: a crawl tool (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb) allows for measuring the number of clicks needed from the homepage.
- The ratio of indexed pages to existing pages: a significant gap indicates problems with linking or robot directives.
- The presence of chain redirects (one URL redirects to another that redirects itself), a sign of a structure that has evolved without cleaning.
These checks do not require development skills. They require time and access to the sitemap, whether HTML or XML. For a site like Refair, whose catalog evolves with the available material stocks, this regular maintenance directly conditions the visibility of new announcements in search results.
