Your website makes sense to you, but what about your customers?

The organisation grows. New services are added, audiences change and different teams develop their own priorities. Content accumulates over time, often with different people responsible for different parts of the site.

None of this is necessarily a problem in itself. However, it can become a problem if the structure of the organisation gradually becomes the structure of the website, too.

Customers see your business differently

Inside the business, that structure is familiar. People know which department does what, where a particular service sits and how different teams connect.

Customers don’t have that context.

Usually, they’re just trying to find an answer, understand a service, assess their options or work out what to do next. And that difference can have a big impact on how easy the business is to understand.

When the website follows the internal structure too closely, customers are left to translate their own needs into the language of the business before they can find what they’re looking for. So while your website might contain all the right information, it also needs to make it easy for the customer to find it.

Growth creates complexity the website needs to absorb

As a business grows, the instinct is to keep adding. New service pages, new audience sections, specific team expertise, new initiatives. All this content is added because it’s useful, relevant or important to someone internally.

But while reasonable, over time, those decisions can leave the website with more possible routes than a customer knows how to navigate. That’s why website strategy needs to start with how people use the site, rather than just reviewing what’s already there.

• What are they looking for when they arrive?
• What questions are they asking?
• What information do they need before they can make a decision?
• What might prevent them from taking the next step?

These questions can reveal opportunities that aren’t always obvious from looking at the existing sitemap alone. They also reveal where the current website reflects internal assumptions over customer behaviour.

For a beauty brand like Heaven Skincare, it makes more sense to categorise products by a user’s pain points. That way, whether it’s dry skin or ageing that they want to tackle, customers get directed straight to the products they need.

For a professional services business, it might make more sense to help visitors navigate by problem, sector or type of support than to expect them to understand the firm’s internal service structure first.

In either instance, the organisation itself doesn’t become any less complex. It’s just that the website stops asking customers to understand that complexity before they can use it.

Simplicity isn’t about hiding what you do

‘But simplifying a website simplifies the business, doesn’t it?’ Not necessarily.

A professional services firm might genuinely have deep expertise across multiple disciplines. An education provider might offer hundreds of courses. A property business might operate across different developments, locations and services.

The website still needs to represent all of that. The question is how much of it a customer needs to understand at any particular point in their journey.

Someone considering a course doesn’t necessarily need to understand the structure of the institution before they can decide whether it’s right for them. Someone looking for professional advice doesn’t need a complete picture of every service the firm offers before they can work out whether there’s a relevant area of expertise.

The website should help them get to the information that matters to them, without requiring them to understand the organisation’s structure first.

More content can make a website harder to use

When a website feels confusing, adding more information can seem like an obvious solution in a bid to clarify what’s on offer. Maybe a new FAQ, another service page, a larger search function or another guide that brings together information from several existing pages.

Those additions can be useful, but more content doesn’t automatically make a website easier to understand and can actually backfire by creating even more places for people to look. The issue is that the answer is difficult to find, sits in an unexpected place or is surrounded by information irrelevant to the customer.

Content, UX and site structure all need to be considered together. That’s how you make the right information easier to find at the point when someone needs it.

So the answer might be adding content. But it could also be combining pages, removing duplication, changing labels or moving useful information closer to the part of the journey where it matters.

The homepage can’t do everything

This is actually a big challenge for organisations with several audiences and a wide range of services. Every team wants representation, every service feels important and every audience has a legitimate reason to want prominence.

The homepage then becomes responsible for explaining too much of the organisation at once. This often leads to a website that talks about what the business does without helping customers work out where they fit.

It’s so important to remember that the homepage doesn’t need to explain everything. It needs to help people recognise that they’re in the right place and find the route that’s most relevant to them.

Different audiences need different ways into the same business

With that in mind, most complex organisations serve several audiences that rarely have the same priorities.

Independent schools might need to communicate with prospective students, current students, parents, researchers, partners and staff. Professional services firms may need to speak to prospective clients, existing clients, recruits and referral partners.

But don’t jump to the conclusion that each audience needs a completely separate experience. The more useful question is where their needs differ, where they overlap and how the website can help each group find the information that matters most to them.

The answer might be clearer entry points, grouping information differently or making certain journeys more prominent. Or it might be accepting that not every audience needs to see every part of the business.

Website structure needs to evolve with the business

Businesses constantly change, and that’s one of the reasons website strategy can’t really be solved once during a redesign. A website that worked well when the organisation was smaller can gradually become harder to use as new services, audiences and priorities are added.

The navigation begins to reflect the history of the business rather than the way customers interact with it now. Changes in proposition, new service lines, mergers, acquisitions and shifts in audience can all introduce new complexity.

Put the customer first

Before changing the navigation, redesigning the homepage or commissioning a whole new website, step outside the business and look at the experience from the customer’s perspective.

• Can people find what they need without understanding how the organisation is structured?
• Are the most important journeys based on customer needs or internal ownership?
• Can someone understand what you offer without already knowing the terminology you use?
• Are you making people choose between too many similar routes?
• Once they find the right information, is it clear what they should do next?

The answers might point towards a redesign. They could also reveal a structural problem, content issue, positioning challenge or customer journey that needs to be rethought.

Complex organisations need a simple way for customers to understand what’s on offer, find what they need and decide what to do next.