There is a point in almost every website project when someone says, “We should probably have a page for that.”
It is a reasonable suggestion. Someone in the organization believes the information is important, so it needs a home. Before long, there are pages for services, industries, capabilities, approaches, programs, teams, resources, news, insights, and whatever else the organization has decided belongs on the website.
The sitemap starts to grow, the navigation gets harder to manage, and someone eventually asks whether all of these pages really need to be there.
The bigger question is how the website got organized that way in the first place.
Your website needs to make sense to someone who doesn’t work there
Most organizations start with what they know. They know their services, their departments, their areas of expertise, and the language they use internally to describe their work. Those things naturally become the building blocks for the website.
Customers arrive at your website with a different perspective. They are trying to understand something, solve a problem, compare options, or decide whether to explore your organization further. They may not know what service they need, which department provides it, or even what you call the problem they are trying to solve. If they cannot find what they need, there are plenty of other places to look.
Your website is one of the few places where you control both the information people see and how it is connected. For some customers, it will also be their first meaningful interaction with your organization. Webflow’s 2025 State of the Website report found that 91% of marketing leaders surveyed said their website drives more revenue than any other marketing channel. That makes the website an important part of both the customer experience and your bottom line.
Keeping a website relevant takes more than maintenance
Yet websites are often treated as something that is already taken care of. If the site is up and running, there may be little perceived reason to invest further in its content, structure, or experience. Over time, it can fall out of step with what customers need and how they expect to find information.
Customer insight changes that conversation. Instead of treating the website as something to maintain, it gives organizations a way to understand what customers are trying to accomplish and how the website can better support those decisions. The first step is understanding what people are actually looking for.
Information architecture starts with how people find their way through information
Information architecture organizes, labels, and connects information so people can find what they need and understand where to go next. Think of it like the rooms in your house: each room has a purpose, the rooms connect in ways that make sense, and you know where to go to find what you need.
On a website, that includes the navigation, sitemap, page groupings, and links between pages. It also includes decisions about what information belongs together and what someone needs to understand before moving on.
Although the term sounds technical, the underlying question is fairly straightforward: how should this website be organized so that it makes sense to the people using it?
Answering that question requires more than deciding which pages should appear in the navigation. It requires an understanding of what customers are trying to accomplish, the questions they have along the way, and the information they use when deciding what to do next.
That is where customer insight becomes important.
Customer insight gives website structure something useful to build on
A website structure is based on a set of decisions about what information matters, where it belongs, and how people are expected to find it. Those decisions become much easier to make when there is evidence behind them.
There is a good reason to pay attention to how easy the website is for customers to use. Forrester’s 2024 Canada Customer Experience Index found that the average score for the ease of customer experiences had fallen to 60%, its lowest point in the history of the index. The research points to a broader challenge for organizations trying to create experiences that feel straightforward and useful.
Move from assumptions to evidence
What I’ve seen in my own work is that the most useful insights are often the ones the organization could not see for itself. A team can spend years talking about its services in a particular way, only to discover through customer conversations that people are thinking about the organization completely differently. I’ve found those moments especially valuable because they give us something concrete to work with. Instead of guessing what might make the website easier to understand, we have evidence from the people the website is actually meant to serve.
Bring different sources of insight together
That evidence can come from several places, and each can tell you something different:
- Customer interviews and conversations can reveal how people describe their needs, what they find confusing, and what information helps them feel more comfortable moving forward.
- Website analytics can show which pages people visit, what they search for, and where they tend to leave.
- Search data can provide clues about the language people use when looking for a solution, while sales and service teams can offer valuable insight into the questions customers ask throughout the buying or engagement process.
Each source provides a different perspective. The value comes from bringing those perspectives together and using them to make better decisions, rather than treating research as an end in itself. This is the same principle that applies when turning customer research into marketing strategy: the insight needs to inform what you do next.
Used together, these sources can help answer some of the questions that matter most when planning a website:
- What are people actually looking for?
- What do they already understand?
- Where do they need more context?
- What information helps them evaluate an option?
- What tends to come up just before they decide to contact someone?
Those answers provide a much stronger starting point for website structure than simply looking at the organization’s existing pages and deciding which ones should stay.
The goal is not to turn every website project into a major research exercise. Even a modest amount of customer insight can change the conversation when it gives the team a clearer understanding of what people are trying to find and why.
The way your business is organized may not reflect how customers look for help
There are good reasons for organizations to organize their work around departments, teams, services, and areas of expertise. Those structures help people understand responsibilities, manage resources, and deliver the work.
However, customers are usually landing on your website with a different starting point.
A prospective client may know they have a complicated organizational challenge without knowing which services they need to solve it.
Start with how customers define the problem
This is often where qualitative research starts to change how a website is structured. Research can uncover the situations, questions, and problems that bring customers to an organization in the first place. Instead of leading with how the organization labels its services internally, the website can reflect how customers are actually thinking about the problem.
For example, a consulting firm might offer research, strategy, facilitation, training, and program evaluation. Those distinctions may be important internally, with different people responsible for each area of work, but a prospective client may simply be thinking, “We have invested in this program and need to understand whether it is working.”
Don’t make customers translate your organization
The difference may seem like minor language differences, but it is significant. Your team knows what your services mean and can explain how they fit together. Your customers are navigating the website on their own. They do not have someone there to translate your terminology or point them in the right direction.
The customer’s starting point is often the problem they are trying to solve. The website needs to help connect that problem to the organization’s expertise in a way that makes sense to the person looking for help.
This does not mean every website needs to be organized around customer problems, or that service categories should disappear. When customers already understand the terminology and know what they are looking for, service-based navigation may work very well.
The important part is understanding how customers are likely to find and interpret the information before deciding that the organization’s internal structure should become the structure of the website.
Signs your website may be organized around your business, not your customers
- Customers often ask us which service they need
- People contact us because they couldn’t find what they were looking for
- We regularly have to point customers to the right page or explain where to start
- The language we use on the website doesn’t match how customers describe what they need when reaching out to us
- We hear questions from customers that the website should already be answering
If several of these sound familiar, the issue may not be your services. It may be the way those services are organized and connected on the website.
Customers move through questions as they decide what to do
People rarely arrive at a website with one question and leave as soon as they have an answer. Finding one piece of information often creates another question. This is particularly true when someone is considering a service or making a decision that carries some degree of risk.
The reality is that customers do not interact with an organization in neat, linear channels either. They move through a journey, with different questions and needs emerging along the way. Understanding that journey can help explain why the relationships between website pages matter so much.
A prospective client may begin by asking whether an organization can help with a particular problem. From there, they may want to know whether the organization has relevant experience, how it approaches the work, who would be involved, and what happens next.
The website should make those connections easy to follow. If someone is reading about a service and their next question is whether the organization has experience with similar work, relevant examples should be easy to find from that page.
This is why the relationships between pages matter. The information may already exist elsewhere on the website, but if customers have to return to the main navigation and search for it, the structure is making them do unnecessary work.
This is not a small issue. Baymard Institute’s 2025 homepage and navigation benchmark found that 58% of desktop and 67% of mobile websites provided mediocre or poor navigation experiences, making it harder for people to find what they are looking for.
At the end of the day, it is not necessarily about the website needing more content. The information may already be there. The opportunity may be to organize and connect what already exists in a way that follows the questions people are likely to have.
Every page should have a clear role in the customer’s decision
One useful way to assess a website is to consider what each page helps someone understand and where it fits in their decision-making process. That requires more than looking at the pages themselves. You need to understand the questions customers have, what they need to know at different points in their journey, and what helps them feel ready to take the next step.
Understand what customers need to know
This is where customer research and ongoing customer insight become particularly useful. Interviews and other qualitative research can uncover the questions people are asking, the concerns they have, and the information they look for as they evaluate an organization. Mapping those insights across the customer journey can help show where different types of content play a role and where there may be gaps.
A service page can help a visitor determine whether an offering is relevant to their situation while giving them enough context to decide what they want to explore next. An About page can explain who the organization is and provide useful context around its experience. A case study can give someone evidence that the organization has addressed a similar challenge. A team page can help a prospective client understand the expertise behind the work.
Build for the decision, not just the conversion
Those pages do not all need to push someone towards a contact form.
For organizations with complex services or longer decision cycles, people may need time to understand the problem, consider their options, build confidence, and assess whether the organization is a good fit before they are ready to have a conversation. A useful website gives them access to the information they need at each stage of that process.
Keep that understanding current
This understanding should not come only from a one-time research project. Customer questions and decision-making can change as services evolve, markets shift, and new information becomes available. Ongoing conversations with customers, sales and service teams, website analytics, and other sources of insight can help keep that understanding current.
Looking at pages this way can also reveal content that has accumulated over time without a clear purpose. A page may have been added because someone needed somewhere to put a piece of information. Over several years, the website can end up carrying a collection of pages that are individually reasonable but collectively difficult to navigate.
Asking what customer question each page answers, where it fits in the customer’s journey, how it connects to other information, and what someone is likely to need next can help bring some order to that collection.
Sometimes the answer will be a new page. In other cases, it may be a better way of connecting existing content, combining two pages, changing a navigation label, or moving an important piece of information earlier in the experience.
Customer insight should influence the structure before the wireframe
There is a natural temptation to move quickly into sitemap development and wireframing because those activities make a website project feel tangible. Once there is a list of pages and a visual representation of how those pages might work, it becomes much easier for everyone involved to see the project taking shape.
There is value in pausing before that point to consider what the customer evidence is telling you.
- What are people actually looking for?
- What language are they using?
- What questions come up repeatedly?
- What information do they need to take the next step?
- Where do existing customers tend to get confused?
- How are people using the current website?
Those questions can influence much more than the content on individual pages. They can change what belongs in the navigation, how services are grouped, which pages need to exist, and how different parts of the website should connect.
This is also where qualitative and quantitative information can work particularly well together. Conversations with customers can help explain why a particular question keeps coming up, while analytics or search data can show how often people are looking for related information and where they are finding it.
The combination provides a more complete picture of what the website needs to do.
It also gives the team something useful to work from when making decisions about structure, rather than relying primarily on internal assumptions.
Wireframing gives the team a way to work through the experience
Once there is a clearer understanding of what customers need to know, wireframing provides a practical way to work through how that information should appear on the page.
A wireframe is essentially a visual plan for a webpage. It shows what information belongs on the page, how that information should be arranged, what needs to stand out, and where someone can go next. It gives the team something concrete to review before development begins.
Designing the experience before designing the page
This is one of my favourite parts of the process because a wireframe gives us somewhere to think. We can take everything we have learned about the customer, the business, and the goals for the website and start working through what that should actually mean on a page. It is still early enough to question things, move things around, take something out, or try a completely different approach without creating a lot of rework.
When I first start working on a wireframe, the goal is not trying to make the page look good, it is to make the experience make sense. I am looking at what someone needs to understand when they arrive, what questions are likely to come up, what evidence they need, and what should happen next. I am also looking for the places where we are asking the customer to do too much work to understand what the organization is trying to tell them.
That means I am constantly asking questions such as:
- What does someone need to understand when they arrive on this page?
- What will help them decide whether this is relevant to them?
- What questions are likely to come up as they read?
- Are we giving them the information they need to answer those questions?
- What evidence or examples would help them evaluate the organization?
- What would be a natural next step from here?
- Does the page provide enough information for the decision someone is actually making?
Making the experience visible
I also love wireframes because they give everyone something tangible to react to. Marketing can look at the messaging. Subject matter experts can identify missing information. Leadership can consider whether the page reflects the business. And the people thinking about the customer experience can look at whether the pieces actually work together. Instead of having a conversation about an abstract website, we can point to something on the page and ask, “Does this belong here? Is this clear? What would someone need next?”.
That often surfaces issues that are difficult to identify in a sitemap or a content document. A service may need a clearer explanation, two pages may make more sense as one, an important piece of evidence may need to appear earlier, or a link may be missing because it answers an obvious follow-up question.
For me, that is the real value of wireframing. It creates a space where the strategy can be explored and moulded before it becomes a finished website. Finding those issues while the page is still a collection of boxes and words gives the team considerably more freedom to make the experience better than finding them after the website has been fully designed and developed.
Website structure is one way strategy becomes part of the customer experience
A strategy can clarify who an organization wants to serve, how it wants to position itself, what it offers, and what it wants customers to understand. The next step is making sure those decisions show up in the experiences customers have with the organization.
Your website is one of those experiences. It is one of the few places where you have real control over the narrative: what people see, how you explain what you do, and how you connect your expertise to the problems they are trying to solve. That makes it important to be intentional about helping people understand what you offer, seeing how it relates to their situation, and finding the information they need to decide what to do next.
Customer insight helps identify what people are trying to accomplish and what they need to know. Strategy provides direction, while information architecture helps organize the information in a way that makes sense to customers.
That is a significant amount of strategic thinking behind decisions that can look as simple as which pages belong in the navigation or how they connect.
This is also where the customer experience gap can emerge after strategy work. Strategic decisions need to carry through into the places where customers interact with an organization, including how they find, navigate, and make sense of the information on your website.
That connection between strategy and customer experience is the critical part of building a website around what customers actually need.
How we can help
Marketing Mile helps organizations bring customer insight into the way they plan, structure and improve their websites.
This includes customer research, reviewing your existing website, developing information architecture, looking at customer decision-making, planning page content, creating wireframes, and working through how pages should connect to support the questions customers are asking.
The process starts with understanding the people the website needs to serve and the decisions they are trying to make. From there, the website can be structured around what customers need to understand while still reflecting the organization’s services, expertise, and priorities.
A well-organized website gives people a clearer way to find the information that matters to them, understand how the pieces fit together, and decide what they want to explore next.
That is where customer insight becomes useful beyond the research itself. It shapes the strategy, influences the structure of the website, and helps create an experience that feels clear and natural to the people using it.
About the Author
Emily Sumarah is a User Experience Strategist who supports Marketing Mile clients in ensuring that customer-driven strategy is reflected in their digital experiences. She helps organizations create websites that align with user needs, support decision-making, and consistently bring strategic priorities to life.
