We’re working with a WordPress website with a rich collection of content. It’s full of great stuff, but the site owner feels like it’s time to get things organized — and we agree. We use the term “site architecture” for a reason — your website should be organized in a logical manner that lets visitors — and you — find everything easily. If you’re in this position, how do you start?
When you have lots of random posts
The site you’re visiting right now has more than 2,300 posts. We work with a lot of sites of this size. The one we’re working on right now has just over 200 posts, which is not a very large number. But they do not have categories or tags to help organize them. The only way to group them is by date, which doesn’t allow you to find all the posts about that trip to visit temples in China.
Use categories and tags and you’re halfway there. You choose a category or tag in the right hand sidebar of the editor. The screenshot below shows how this looks in the Classic Editor. The site owner can make a category called “Temples” and mark all the relevant posts with that category. He could then use the tag “China” and will be able to find all the posts about temples in China efficiently.
Here’s how it looks in the Block Editor. Either way, just click on the appropriate category or type in the appropriate tag.
First, try it out on one post to determine what categories and tags do at your website. This will depend on your theme and how your site is built. We often use categories to tell content where we want it to go. For example, posts at this website which are in the Online Marketing category will go to the home page. We often use “Featured Posts” as the category that sends posts to the homepage. We also make pages that show a specific category, so that all posts marked with that category will go to that page.
Other designers use tags for this purpose. Experiment to find out whether you have any functions of that kind, or ask the designer who built your website. Then use your categories and tags to sort out your posts. You will be able to find them, and your visitors will too.
When you haven’t distinguished between posts and pages
WordPress has posts and pages, and we have discovered that many people aren’t sure about the difference. If you sometimes write things as pages and sometimes write similar things as posts, you will have a hard time organizing them.
The site we mentioned at the beginning has a couple hundred posts — and a hundred pages. They can’t put all the pages into the menu and they don’t show up in the archive. In fact, any of the methods people normally used to show pages won’t work well for 100 pages.
The best solution if you need to make pages into posts or vice versa is a plugin called Post Type Switcher. You can use this on self-hosted WordPress sites, but not at WordPress.com. If you have a site at WordPress.com, you can download your pages and replace the post type in the file. Then upload them as posts. Or you can copy each page’s content into a post and then delete the page.
Do the opposite to change posts to pages.
When you have lots of documents
Having dozens of PDFs or hundreds of photos can make it difficult to find things in your media library. Media Library Folders is the plugin you need to organize your documents so that you can find what you need. Natively, WordPress allows you to search for specific types of files, such as documents or images, or you can search by date. Media Library Folders lets you be much more specific.
When you save media items in future, do your future self a favor and use meaningful titles. You probably will not remember that your best photo of that particular temple was named IMG_4541.
Make some decisions
Before you get too far into the process, make some decisions about how you want to be able to find things — and how you want your visitors to be able to do so. Once you’ve decided on the categories and tags you want to use, determined which items should be posts and which should be pages, and created those media file folders, you will have a lot of the organizing done.
Then you can decide where you want to put your content. What belongs on the homepage? What interior pages do you need? What content should be reached from a sidebar or footer widget? Use internal links and clear navigation to make the logic you’re using clear.
Do you need some help taming your website? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.
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